Hoover wanted to arrest 12,000 US citizens

FORMER FBI director J Edgar Hoover drew up a list of thousands of US citizens he suspected of being disloyal and put forward a plan to have them arrested, newly declassified papers reveal.

He wanted to suspend the rules against illegal detention and arrest up to 12,000 people, according to the 1950 document.

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, less than two weeks after the Korean War began.

But there is no evidence to suggest President Harry Truman or any subsequent president approved any part of Hoover’s proposal to house suspect US citizens in military and federal prisons.

Hoover had wanted Truman to declare the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage”, The New York Times reported.

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% are citizens of the US,” Hoover wrote. “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 is a bedrock legal principle.

All apprehended individuals would eventually have had the right to a hearing under Hoover’s plan, but 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 was among a collection of Cold War-era documents related to intelligence issues from 1950 to 1955.