Writ Denied

This would have made for quite a different history of the last half of the Twentieth Century in the U.S. had it happened.

Report: Former FBI Director Hoover Planned to Arrest 12,000 Americans Suspected of Disloyalty

WASHINGTON — Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a plan to suspend the rules against illegal detention and arrest up to 12,000 Americans he suspected of being disloyal, according to a newly declassified document.

Hoover sent the White House his plan on July 7, 1950, less than two weeks after the Korean War began. Still, there is no evidence to suggest that President Truman or any subsequent president approved any part of Hoover's proposal to house suspect Americans in military and federal prisons.

Hoover wanted Truman to declare the mass arrests as necessary to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage," The New York Times reported Saturday in a story posted on its Web site.

The plan called for the FBI to apprehend all potentially dangerous individuals whose names were on a list Hoover had been compiling for years.

"The index now contains approximately 12,000 individuals, of which approximately 97 percent are citizens of the United States," Hoover wrote in the now-declassified document. "In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the writ of habeas corpus."
Habeas corpus is the right to seek relief from illegal detention, and a bedrock legal principle in America.

Under Hoover's plan, all apprehended individuals would eventually have had the right to a hearing, though the proposed hearing boards — comprised of one judge and two citizens — would not have been bound by the rules of evidence.

The details of Hoover's plan were among a collection of Cold War-era documents related to intelligence from 1950-1955. The State Department declassified the documents on Friday