Word: hoover
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...then on June 27, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover announced to the country that superior American intelligence had foiled a Nazi plan to destroy U.S. bridges and factories. The FBI had captured eight Germans and German-Americans, who had landed in Long Island and Florida. Their arrest set in motion a series of events that can serve as a historical backdrop for President Bush's Nov. 13 executive order permitting the military to try suspected foreign terrorists in tribunals instead of the criminal justice system...
...President Roosevelt and attorney general Francis Biddle, who would serve as the government's lead prosecuting attorney, suddenly had an opportunity to prove that we had made progress, that we had defeated the first Nazi threat on our soil. Hoover in particular wanted to maximize the public relations value of the arrests: He kept secret for a few years that it was two of the saboteurs, who, hoping to defect, had alerted the FBI to the plan, not prodigious agents...
...attorney for a member of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel. One Sunday afternoon in June I was called and asked to report to the Justice Department, where for three months I worked as the youngest of 10 lawyers who tried the saboteurs. In the days after Hoover's announcement, I helped draft a proclamation for Roosevelt that created a military commission to try foreign spies and saboteurs, and denied them the right to judicial review and the right to trial in nonmilitary U.S. courts. They would, instead, be tried by a military tribunal of seven generals, none...
...similar to the one Bush signed Tuesday, and the trial took place in what was then an assembly room for the FBI on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, down the hall from the Attorney General's office (a plaque now commemorates the location, room 5235). J. Edgar Hoover sat at the prosecution table. The press was excluded, except one day when reporters were allowed in while proceedings were in recess so they could see the setup. There was still no revelation that Dasch and his roommate had cooperated. Their plan had been to blow up factories, bridges...
...Only six of the eight, because Hoover finally went to the White House and mentioned the cooperation of Dasch and his roommate. Both received lesser sentences, and both wound up serving just a few years...