The
New York Times reported that according to a newly declassified
document, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, in 1950, planned to suspend
habeas corpus and permanently imprison 12,000 “disloyal” American
citizens in military prisons. Under Hoover’s proposal, the mass arrests of “all individuals
potentially dangerous to national security” would be carried out under
“a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the FBI.
Hoover saw the arrests necessary
to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.”
Hoover was guilty of projection when he called Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,
“the most dangerous man in America, and a moral degenerate.” With his one-man
war on progressive social movements, the civil rights movement and
African American leadership, antiwar activists, and radical groups,
he had been the greatest threat to democracy until the current occupants
of the White House came to power. Under his COINTELPRO program, devised
to “prevent the rise of a black messiah,” Dr. King, Malcolm X and
other leaders were assassinated or otherwise neutralized, members
of leftwing political groups framed and imprisoned, and their causes
denigrated and defamed. Even today, the appalling COINTELPRO legacy
lives on, as eight former Black Panthers were arrested for the 1971
killing of a San Francisco
police officer, trumped up charges based on evidence obtained through
torture. Perhaps we will never know how much better America would have been without J. Edgar Hoover.
Clearly, Hoover
and his ilk represent the worst in America - an aversion to the
rule of law, secret government, spying on citizens, condoning torture,
squelching democratic movements and other fascistic tendencies. So,
why do we allow a federal building to take the name of such a loathsome
individual?
Of course, I speak of the J. Edgar
Hoover Building, the headquarters of the FBI in Washington,
DC. Perhaps it can be argued that it really doesn’t matter, Hoover
left us a long time ago and can no longer harm us, and having a building
named after him is mere symbolism in any case.
But it does matter, primarily
because the U.S. has not learned lessons from its past. Although
Hoover died in 1972, he lives
on in an antidemocratic mindset that pushes the nation towards fascistic
behavior. “Enhanced interrogation techniques,” or torture, is viewed
as an acceptable weapon in America’s war on terror. Terror suspects are kidnapped
and imprisoned indefinitely, without charges, without evidence and
without trial. Citizens are secretly monitored. That we have allowed
the Bush administration to engage in these activities is proof that
we have not come to terms with the shameful Hoover
legacy. Once we erase Hoover’s
name from the building, and revoke all posthumous honors bestowed
upon him, then we can begin to repair the damage done by this petty
American dictator and his ideological heirs.
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member David A. Love, JD is a lawyer
and prisoners’ rights advocate based in Philadelphia,
and a contributor to the Progressive Media Project, McClatchy-Tribune News Service,
In
These Times and Philadelphia Independent Media
Center. He contributed to the book, States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (St. Martin's Press, 2000). Love is a former Amnesty International UK
spokesperson, organized the first national police brutality conference
as a staff member with the Center for Constitutional Rights, and served
as a law clerk to two Black federal judges. His blog is davidalove.com. Click
here to contact Mr. Love.