Another reason to oppose the “eco-terrorism” rhetoric, and “Homegrown Terrorism” legislation, is that it eerily paves the way for things like this. I started using the analogy between the Red Scare and Green Scare simply to make a larger point, and it has been truly frightening to see the specific similarities between the two, right down to rolling back habeas corpus, creating black lists, and using parallel language.

From The San Francisco Chronicle:

A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the long-time director of the FBI, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty…

Hoover wanted President Harry Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The FBI would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover compiled over many years. “The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven percent are citizens of the United States,” he wrote.

Only 12,000, J. Edgar? Puhleeeze. You’ve got nothing on the Bush administration. 755,000 and counting, baby.

[And yep, that's J. Edgar Hoover with O.J. Simpson, courtesy of this website.]