Wow, you mean J. Edgar was a bastard?

Infamous FBI capo J. Edgar Hoover apparently thought there were a few things worth emulating about the Soviet Union -- rounding up dissidents and holding them without trial, for example. Says the Washington Post:

Former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had a plan to suspend the rules against illegal detention shortly after the Korean War began and arrest as many as 12,000 Americans he suspected of being disloyal, according to a newly declassified document...

The plan called for the FBI to apprehend all potentially dangerous individuals whose names were on a list that Hoover had been compiling for years.

"The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven percent are citizens of the United States," Hoover wrote in the now-declassified document. "In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus."

Habeas corpus, by the way, can only be suspended by Congress, and then only in "Cases of Rebellion or Invasion." Not all presidents have agreed, but in ex parte Milligan, the Supreme Court pretty much decided the issue.