The precedent goes back a lot further than that, It's almost an American tradition it's been going on so long. There was a law passed in 1798, the Alien & Sedi

The precedent goes back a lot further than that, It's almost an American tradition it's been going on so long. There was a law passed in 1798, the Alien & Sedition Acts, that was used to jail people who were against the so called Quasi-war on the grounds they were dangerous to national security. Howard Zinn discusses it in the book "A People's History of the United States". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts