Avenge me son! Aveeenge MEEE!
Posted on 04/04/2008 11:24:46 AM PDT by SpaceBar
After 50 years, an American state secret has been revealed, about the arrest of 12,000 people because of Hoover’s “red” paranoia.
The former director of the FBI, Edgar Hoover made plans for the arrest of 12,000 American citizens which he considered to be threats to national security – documents reveals that no longer bear the status of state secret.
Hoover sent this request to the president at the time Harry Truman at the beginning of the Korean war during the 50s.
He justified the move as necessary for protection from “treason, spies and sabotage”. For now there is no evidence to whether these arrests actually occurred in practice or not.
Changes of laws due to “exceptional circumstances”
Hoover asked Truman to suspend the century old right to a defence in court that protected the individual citizens from unlawful arrest (better known as Habeas Corpus). Hoover planned on breaking this law and putting 12,000 people in military and federal prisons. The list of suspects took years to make, and the moment came to implement the plans of illegal confinement. The American Congress authorised the law in July 1950 after the Korea was broke out.
Truman said that an exceptional situation was at hand, and that his changes must be implemented.
Today, those secret documents no longer carry the marking of state secret, and the public has had an opportunity to see their contents. As mentioned, 12 thousand people were in question, of which 97 percent were American citizens.
(more at link...)
I am reminded of the punchline of that old joke about a busload of lawyers going over a cliff.
If the President suspends habeas corpus, as Hoover asked him to, it would in no way be breaking the law since it is a presidential prerogative explicitly enshrined in the Constitution.
12,000? What’s the point? It’s a drop in the bucket.
I am betting that it would be an entirely different world we would be living in today if he did it though...
I would wonder if J. Edgar would have led the charge in drag or not?
funny, considering your tagline. the president has NO authority to suspend Habeaus Corpus. Congress can ONLY overturn Habeaus during a rebellion or an invasion
But nobody stopped Lincoln when he did it.
If he had done it and gotten rid of them, we might not have 100 million plus traitors today.
A good place to start would be outside the DNC convention. Just wrap the place in razor wire, put guards on the doors and be done with it ;-)
All these references can be traced to a single page in a single book by BBC journalist Tony Summers in which he claims that an unidentified source told Summers that the source had twice seen Hoover in drag.
Summers also believes that American right-wingers plotted to assassinate President Kennedy.
JEHoover should have at least followed up on Joe McCarthy’s work and chased the traitors out of the country. That would have been a good thing!
“I would wonder if J. Edgar would have led the charge in drag or not?”
Hoover was not a cross-dresser.
It was made up out of thin air, and became a part of common knowledge through the efforts of the media and it’s cultural siblings.
Since it is the responsibility of the executive to provide a writ of habeas corpus, the suspension of the writ would entail the executive not providing it - but not providing it only in the circumstances above described.
“paranoia” ?????
You call it paranoia after those people have carried us so deep into Socialism that we can’t even drill for oil on our own land or build nuclear power plants????? You call that paranoia?
They’ve taken over our government so that it won’t even maintain our borders, and you call it paranoia?????
They’ve installed Gorbachev right her in the United States and sent Jimmy Carter, who gave away our very strategic Panama Canal, all over the world encouraging tyrants, and you call Hoover’s concern paranoia? That’s what the Communists call it.
I call it telling the truth when others hid and still hide their eyes and ears.
And there never will be.
Habeas Corpus writs are issued by the courts, not the executive. Any citizen in custody has the right to apply for one in court.
The FBI has no authority to “followed up on Joe McCarthy’s work and chased the traitors out of the country.” The AG msut authorize such actions.
The left will scream about this, but remain curiously silent about over 100 million killed by left wing governments.
So far as I can tell, the direct source is a Croatian(?) site and the date of the report is December 23, 2007. In turn, it appears to be based on an earlier New York Times report.
I suspect this is a pretty bent version of the NYT’s report; certainly we’d have heard about it endlessly if the Times had reported something very much like this.
I found it linked from Michael Savage’s website. His people are pretty good at finding oddball stories.
I spoke infelicitously.
There are two documents in question: the court, or the petitioner via the court, requiring the executive to provide evidence justifying the arrest and producing the accused before the court for examination.
It would be better to say the executive "responds" to the petition rather than "provides."
In any case, the way a suspension of heabeas corpus would work in practice is that the executive detains someone, the court is petitioned to require the executive to produce the accused and its evidence, and the executive ignores the summons, pleading that because of public emergency it is released from this obligation.
J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI, requested that 12,000 communist be held in jail. Was Harry Truman one of the 12,000?
He's in San Francisco, that's scarcely part of the United States.
They would have to bump that number to about 12 million today.
As for Hoover being "paranoid" and a cross-dresser/homo, careful study of the period's history leads me to believe he was just one more victim of vicious lies spread by the anti-anti-Communists to cover their real crimes. It boggles my mind that so-called "conservatives" are so ready to believe lies spread by the Far Left.
“It’s a drop in the bucket.”
I wonder how much better off we’d be today if all the commies back in the old days had been rounded up and hung.
yes they did (supreme court) stopped him.
Correct. But the right to do that is granted to Congress, not to the President. It wouldn't make much sense to grant the President the right to suspend judicial oversight of himself.
I don’t believe a word of this.
So Bush really is like Truman: both failed utterly to combat the 5th column within.
A good place to start would be outside the DNC convention. Just wrap the place in razor wire, put guards on the doors and be done with it ;-)
It would look like the scene from Red Dawn! Harry Reid (Played by harry Dean Stanton) would be screaming to his boy (played by Patrick Swayze) “Avenge me son! Aveeeenge Me!!!!”
I tend to agree.
With limitations on when it can be used, specifically in the case of rebellion or invasion, when the public safety requires it. There was no rebellion and the U.S. wasn't invaded when Truman was in office.
I'm sure it would be. But life in a police state has no attraction for me.
The Constitution says under what circumstances habeas corpus can be suspended. It is silent on who may suspend it.
Living under a police state, how would we know?
Most of them wouldn’t have the sense to ask anyone to avenge them- they would be burning up the phone lines to the ACLU and their attorneys. I agree that would be a great place to start.
The Constitution does not specify that the power to suspend is granted exclusively to Congress.
Me either, but think about some of the names that might have been on that list, that was what I was doing. Imagine if Oswald was on it, or any number of communist sympathizers who’s detention would have changed our history.
I didn’t say I agreed with it, I was pointing out how much it could have changed history is all.
Would you rather he arrested William Taft, Thomas Dewey, Richard Nixon or prominent Republicans? How about arresting you?
Grant the president the right to jail 'traitors' without trial and you're leaving yourself at the mercy of his definition of just who a traitor is.
Who gets to define just who the traitor is?
Avenge me son! Aveeenge MEEE!
The dem’s can’t decide who their nominee will be between fric and frac, can you imagine the debate over what a traitor would be?
There were only 12,000 Communists in America? Or only 12,000 Communists in influential positions.
There are probably 12,000 Communists in Berkeley (or at least FROM Berkeley in Washington DC, NYC, etc. wherever the latest WTO, G8 Summit, anti-American war protest etc. is being held) alone today.
Duh, talk radio.
And half of those have office hours in Boalt Hall.
It's all academic anyway. The suspension of habeas corpus is not a blanket power. The Supreme Court ruled in 1865 that habeas corpus cannot be suspended in parts of the country where the courts operate freely and openly. Not that the Constitution was ever a big concern to J. Edgar.
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