After almost 60 years hidden from the prying eyes of the American people, an FBI plan from 1950 has been declassified and deemed safe enough for public consumption. (I hope you can access this New York Times story without membership; you might have to open a free registration there.)
If you’re in a hurry, let me summarize. Hoover’s plan involved the suspension of habeas corpus in order to imprison 12,000 or so American citizens that he suspected of disloyalty. I can’t vouch, but I’d give good odds that more than a few personal and political enemies of J. Edgar H were also on that list.
Hoover’s now-declassified plan called for permanent detention of his 12,000 suspects, either in military or federal prisons. Those detained might eventually get a hearing, but those hearings “would not be bound by the rules of evidence.”
Jump to the present. As of October ’07, there were more than 866,000 names on the U.S. Terrorist Watch List. The list is maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, and it isn’t getting smaller. By far, most of those listed are Americans. And how might someone get nominated for this list? Lots of ways, including, to be fair, being an actual terrorist.
But take a look at this flyer from the Bureau of Strategic Deployment in Chicago. In essence, it enlists us all as amateur agents, and encourages us to dial 911 and report one another for behavior that includes being where we look like we don’t belong, note-taking, binocular possession, and the use of cameras and maps.
Is it paranoid to fear some parallels here, between an official 1950s-era plan by the legendary head of the FBI to list, surveil, and imprison 12,000+ purported enemies of the State, and our current watch-list effort that’s 72 times larger? In the event of another national emergency, whatever its cause, what role might that list play?
And with prisons (as cheerily reported here) and private military/law enforcement entities rapidly becoming the new growth industries in the U.S., there’ll certainly be enough taxpayer-funded cells to go around.
Granted, I’m currently spending about 12 hours a day in a fictional, alternate-reality 2003, where major events are driven by deep, dark agendas, and things like million-citizen watch-lists and FEMA internment camps are real, not imagined.
Trouble is, as with the first book I wrote, a lot of the fiction keeps coming true, almost before I can get it published.
By the way, if you find yourself on the Terrorist Watch List and feel like you don’t belong there, here’s how you can try to get off of it. Good luck with that.
