Hoover's plan to abolish Habeas Corpus linked to his 'closet' lifestyle

The headlines trumpet J. Edgar Hoover's plan to suspend Habeas Corpus for some 12,000 American citizens. Largely unreported are his motives. His repressive attitudes and policies were, in fact, a shield, his protection against critics. J. Edgar Hoover was a closet, practicing homosexual even as he headed the FBI.

Hoover's FBI kept files on almost everyone of any consequence in government, including several Presidents of the United States. Apparently his plan worked. At a time when the gay lifestyle was very much the subject of whispers, everyone was terrified of Hoover because of how he might retaliate. For decades, Hoover did not merely pursue "commies", he pursued, arrested and prosecuted "gay people" for "being gay". The words "colossal hypocrisy" come to mind.

The recently publicized document, however, is a specific case that makes the point: the GOP is an institutional threat to American Democracy. As we might have suspected, Hoover had planned to do what George W. Bush may have succeeded in doing, that is, suspending habeas corpus and imprisoning in concentration camps without trial or Due Process of law some 12,000 people whose names had somehow gotten on his shit list.

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 FBI 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.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven per cent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.

--Hoover Planned Mass Jailing in 1950

Another famous GOP list maker comes to mind --Richard Nixon, whose "enemies list" was at the very heart of the Watergate Scandal. Habeas corpus, the right to seek relief from illegal detention, is a fundamental principle of law traceable to the Magna Carta.

Before penning the Declaration of Independence--the first of the American Charters of Freedom--in 1776, the Founding Fathers searched for a historical precedent for asserting their rightful liberties from King George III and the English Parliament. They found it in a gathering that took place 561 years earlier on the plains of Runnymede, not far from where Windsor Castle stands today. There, on June 15, 1215, an assembly of barons confronted a despotic and cash-strapped King John and demanded that traditional rights be recognized, written down, confirmed with the royal seal, and sent to each of the counties to be read to all freemen. The result was Magna Carta--a momentous achievement for the English barons and, nearly six centuries later, an inspiration for angry American colonists.

--Magna Carta and Its American Legacy

The Bush administration's decision to hold suspects for years at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has made habeas corpus a contentious issue for the US Congress and the Supreme Court. But it shouldn't be! It should be sacrosanct. This issue was settled when King John signed the Magna Carta at the behest of the barons who held the upper hand. Why are we debating now an issue that was settled in the year 1215? Why is the GOP so threatened by habeas corpus? Why would the GOP return the US to a theocratic state akin to what might have existed in the Middle Ages? Why is the GOP backward, retarded, dysfunctional? Why are Republicans, like Huckabee, utterly ignorant of law or history? Why do Republicans fear the intellect? Why do they fear freedom?

Hoover's plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The plan called for "the permanent detention" of 12,000 suspects at military bases as well as in federal prisons.

The FBI, he said, had found that the arrests it proposed in New York and California would cause the prisons there to overflow. So the bureau had arranged for "detention in Military facilities of the individuals apprehended" in those states.

The prisoners eventually would have had a right to a hearing under the Hoover plan. The hearing board would have comprised one judge and two citizens. But the hearings "will not be bound by the rules of evidence."

Hoover's July 1950 letter was addressed to Sidney Souers, who had served as the first director of central intelligence and was then a special national-security assistant to Truman. The plan also was sent to the executive secretary of the National Security Council, whose members were the president, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state and the military chiefs.

In September 1950, Congress passed and Truman signed a law authorizing the detention of "dangerous radicals" if the president declared a national emergency. But no known evidence suggests any president approved Hoover's proposal.

--J. Edgar Hoover sought mass arrests in 1950, document shows, Herald Tribune

What good is a hearing not bound by the "rules of evidence"? A hearing bound by the rules of evidence is the bloody point! Whenever the power of the state is exercised free of that common sense restraint, you can bet that there is, in fact, no evidence in support of the state's position. "States" throughout history have a lousy record! Why do we put up with it? Why are people so easily fooled?

A state that finds it necessary to lie to its people in order to maintain itself in power is an illegitimate state! Any state which denies to its people the protections of habeas corpus is, by its action, illegitimate and should be --in Jeffersons' words --abolished!! Any state which manufactures a fraudulent state of emergency upon phony terrorist alerts and other lies, is, by its actions, illegitimate and must be voted out or otherwise supplanted. That was precisely the position of Thomas Jefferson who wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

--Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

Later, Che Guevarra would say the same thing even more succinctly:

People must see clearly the futility of maintaining the fight for social goals within the framework of civil debate. When the forces of oppression come to maintain themselves in power against established law; peace is considered already broken.

--Che Guevarra, Guerrilla Warfare, Chapter I: General Principles of Guerrilla Warfare

Bush has already broken the peace. The government of the United States is illegitimate and, is in fact, treasonously at war with the sovereign people of the United States!

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J. Edgar Hoover's Dirty Hands

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