According to today’s NY TImes, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from 1924 – 1972, sent a plan on July 7, 1950 to President Truman to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty, saying that mass arrests were necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.”
Hoover’s plan was declassified Friday as part of a collection of cold-war documents concerning intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955. The collection makes up a new volume of “The Foreign Relations of the United States,” a series that by law has been published continuously by the State Department since the Civil War.
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