[dalke]

All I see in the history is "McCarthy identified several agents actively engaged in espionage. KGB records identify hundreds more that he missed. / McCarthy identified many more people in sensitive positions who were security risks, many with Communist associations."

I see nothing which says that "sensitive positions" is or was meant as a term limited to the executive branch or to administrative positions.

Wouldn't a non-administrative physicist on the atomic bomb project, like Theodore Hall, count as a "sensitive position"? Since I'm pretty sure that was the view back then.

Keeping people in an internment camp rather made it difficult to have an administrative position, so I don't really see the difference. Well, there's a different mechanism, but the same end goal - keep Japanese/Communists out of possible sensitive positions because some people who are Japanese/Communists are the enemy. No?