The NYT had an interesting historical item over the weekend over the kind of power grab that might even give Dick Cheney pause.
A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.
Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
Apparently, the 12,000 Americans were part of a list Hoover had been compiling over the course of several years. In his correspondence to the president, he said, “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States.”
And how could Hoover detain 12,000 law-abiding Americans without charges? “In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.
Obviously, given the recent debate(s) over the suspension of habeas for “unlawful enemy combatants,” and Bush’s assertion that he can detain terrorist suspects indefinitely without charges, reading about Hoover’s extraordinary plan for “the permanent detention” of “disloyal” Americans maintains a certain contemporary salience.
Of course, some of our friends on the right perceive different lessons from this story.
At Power Line, the Hoover story in the NYT prompted this back-and-forth between John Hinderaker and Paul Mirengoff.
HINDERAKER: Hoover was too quick to judge people disloyal–it would be interesting to get a look at the list of 12,000–but some may feel nostalgic for a time when disloyalty was at least acknowledged to be a bad thing.
MIRENGOFF: Hoover did not favor the mass internment of Japanese-Americans that occurred after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
HINDERAKER: True. But if we had gone to war with the Soviet Union, I’ll bet he would have been champing at the bit to round up Communists and Communist sympathizers. Of course, there is a huge difference in principle between rounding up those who are believed to be disloyal and rounding up, or restricting the movements of, an entire ethnic group. And domestic Communists would have posed a far greater security risk than Japanese aliens and Japanese-Americans.
MIRENGOFF: Without a doubt. The World War II example shows that, at least in some cases, Hoover was less quick than certain liberals to judge people potentially disloyal.
First, the suggestion that “disloyalty” has become fashionable is just ugly, even by Power Line standards.
Second, as John Cole noted, “When your first instinct upon learning of [Hoover’s] plan is to try to figure out how the liberals are worse, you have issues.”