Here’s something interesting:

Quarantine is voluntary or compulsory isolation, typically to contain the spread of something considered dangerous, often but not always disease. The word comes from the Italian (seventeenth century Venetian) language Italian quarantena, meaning forty day period.

Quarantine law began in Colonial America in 1663, when in an attempt to curb an outbreak of smallpox, the city of New York established a quarantine. In the 1730s, the city built a quarantine station on the Bedloe’s Island.[2]

The Philadelphia Lazaretto was the first quarantine hospital in the United States, built in 1799, in Tinicum Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania.[3]

There are similar national landmarks such as Ellis Island and Angel Island.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy euphemistically referred to the U.S. Navy’s interdiction of shipping en route to Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis as a “quarantine” rather than a blockade, because a quarantine is a legal act in peacetime, whereas a blockade is defined as an act of aggression under the U.N. Charter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine#U.S.

And the rest of your comment is true enough. Sometimes we just disagree where the balance point lies. What to do about Guantánamo is indeed a problem, but it wouldn’t be the kind of problem it is if we hadn’t been afflicted with a political leadership whose idea of balance is unbalanced in all the fundamental ways which led people to invent democracies in the first place.

I’m too lazy for HTML and there was no room above, nor a “reply to this” link. Fair enough and why would you suppose I don’t consider this? One also must balance two sets of competing systems of values. This is not a binary choice. This is going half again to either extreme,ad infinitum. You know you never reach either extreme because the points along the way to either extreme are infinite in number.

It isn’t much different from the debate over abortion, really. Not from my perspective, at least.

As Isaiah Berlin himself, said:

“Freedom for the wolves means death for the sheep.”

Greenwald quoted John Adams in the detention thread, to argue that no one should trust any man, not even Obama.

“There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.”
– John Adams

It seems like an argument for detention of some, especially when you consider he also said:

“Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good and happiness of the people…”

Both can be found in his “notes for an oration at Braintree”.

I don’t think this would have been a difficult choice for most of the Founders, but I could be wrong, just like anyone else, including Adams himself.

1) Over time, the definition of sexual predator tends to broaden. An off duty cop recently came to my door, handing out scary-looking flyers, as the law in AZ requires, announcing that a convicted sex offender was moving into the area. His offense? Molesting a sixteen year-old girl when he was seventeen. He’s now 37, and hasn’t been charged with anything, let alone convicted, in the ensuing twenty years.

2) Life imprisonment for any class of person who scares the public sufficiently, or can be made to, is ultimately worse for us than any supposed epidemic of pedophiles and sexual predators.

Update — 2) could have been a little clearer, I now realize. Let’s try a little editing:

2) Life imprisonment for any class of person based on who we believe them to be, and what we believe that they might do, rather than what we can prove that they’ve done — especially when they’re being characterized for us by interested parties in or out of the government — is ultimately worse for us than any supposed epidemic of pedophiles and sexual predators.

Perhaps I won’t have to grab you by the lapels after all.

I ventured into the monkey cage and the place is still loaded with poo flinging cage climbers. The level of discourse is embarrassing. Most blog threads leave me unimpressed but I have found one I marginally like. I did a little googling and I was able to come up with a link to an abstract at SSRN you might find useful. It will point you in the right direction for further study, vis a vis court cases. It’s not bad. Check it out.

Sex Offenders, Unlawful Combatants, and Preventive Detention

Michael L. Corrado
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – School of Law

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=735266

As it happens, though, I agree with you about the preventive detention of sexual predators, and had intended to write something at some point about the hysteria factor in modern living and the demagoguery increasingly being used to manipulate it. From my perspective, it has more to do with The Scarlet Letter, or The Crucible, than it does with sensible public policy.

I was once out to dinner with someone who claimed that research had proven that the recidivism rates for sexual predators were way higher than for any other class of criminal — virtually 100% — and that these people can never be changed, and they can’t help themselves. He was of the very conventional, very well thought out middle-class opinion that we should run them through a battery of psychological tests, and then lock them away forever.

I didn’t reply; I finished my salmon croquettes, and waited for the subject to change, but I did think later about where the good burgher got hold of the nonsense he was spouting, and why it seemed so perfectly sensible to him.

My conclusion: from the same place, and with the same seal of approval, as we’re now getting the conventional wisdom about detaining terrorists forever.

Here you go, William.

Obama’s tentative embrace of preventive detention has everyone up in arms – as if this is something new and unAmerican. Perhaps it is unAmerican, but it isn’t anything new.

All due respect to Digby, she’s got this wrong:

Involuntary committment cannot be used for criminals, who everyone knows may very well re-offend when they are released, so it certainly cannot be used for terrorist suspects who are accused of being at war with America.

From wiki:

“Some U.S. states have a special status for criminals designated as sexually violent predators, which allows these offenders to be held in prison after their sentence is complete if they are considered to be a risk to the public.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_predator

It, preventitive detention, became popular in the 90s with all the rampant TV generated sexual predator fear and paranoia.

An interesting book at Amazon. Haven’t read but looks decent.

Failure to Protect: America’s Sexual Predator Laws And the Rise of the Preventive State

http://www.amazon.com/Failure-Protect-Americas-Predator-Preventive/dp/0801443784

let the flaming begin. I can already hear the civil libertarians whine.