The headline I’m seeing today about the Constitution Project, a conservative group including David Keene (American Conservative Union), Grover Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform) and Bob Barr (Libertarian Presidential candidate in ’08) is that they “back the Obama Administration” on trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others in federal courts. That’s only a part of what the organization released today.

True, Barr, Norquist and Keene signed a statement denouncing the scaremongering from Republicans on the issues of Article III courts for terror suspects and using the federal prison system instead of Guantanamo for housing them. That does provide support to the Administration’s decision on KSM and the proposal floated to use a federal prison in Thomson Illinois to imprison the remaining detainees at Guantanamo while they await trial. The trio references Thomson in their statement.

However, there is another statement out today from the Constitution Project, which prepared the document for Barr, Norquist and Keene. Their the joint statement with Human Rights First, a liberal-leaning organization, makes a broader statement about war on terror policies that goes much further than the Administration has thus far, and offers an implicit criticism of their methods. The statement, which borrows some of the same language as in the Barr/Norquist/Keene statement defends the use of civilian courts as the “proper forum” for terrorism cases, perhaps implicitly criticizing the use of military commissions to try other suspects, which Attorney General Eric Holder concurrently announced last Friday. This creates a two-tiered system of justice where the nature of the trial you receive depends on the nature of the evidence held against you, a stacked deck if ever there was one.

In addition, the statement severely criticizes the use of preventive, indefinite detention, which the Obama Administration has asserted an intention to do. “We are confident that the government can preserve national security without resorting to sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition that has served us effectively for over two centuries,” the statement reads.

Here is the section of the statement on preventive and indefinite detention:

Terrorism suspects should be criminally tried, not detained without charge

We believe it is unconstitutional to detain indefinitely terrorism suspects in the United States without charge, either for the purposes of interrogation and intelligence-gathering or solely on the basis of suspected dangerousness. There are limited times when preventive detention, subject to required procedural protections, is appropriate in the context of armed conflict. However, the continued detention without charge of the detainees remaining in Guantanamo is not appropriate and is contrary to American values.

Indefinite detention without charge is counterproductive and harms the U.S. reputation globally

Instituting a system of indefinite detention without charge in the United States for terrorism suspects would threaten the constitutional protections enshrined in our justice system and is simply bad policy. Such a system would undoubtedly result in protracted litigation, delaying justice in these cases. In addition, establishing a system of detention without charge would damage the ability of the United States to promote respect for human rights around the world, embolden human rights violators, and tarnish our Nation’s reputation with international allies. Thus, by discouraging cooperation by international allies and communities around the world whose assistance is needed to defeat terrorism, a system of detention without charge would undermine U.S. counterterrorism and counterinsurgency efforts and thereby also increase the danger to American military and other U.S. personnel serving abroad.

These are stinging rebukes to the policies of indefinite detention which the Obama Administration has yet to disavow. Even after shrinking from passing a statutory law for indefinitely detaining terror suspects, the White House still plans to hold some detainees without charges. And this bipartisan set of civil rights groups is speaking out against that.

Unfortunately, the traditional media is so taken with the rare example of conservatives supporting Obama on any issue that they have neglected to report this second statement, where conservatives and liberals join together to criticize what they consider to be unconstitutional detention policies. Reagan Kuhn, a communications aide at Human Rights First, explained that their standpoint is to “try and forge, in general, bipartisan agreement on a host of issues.”

UPDATE: I just got off the phone with Laura Olson, senior counsel for the Constitution Project. It turns out that their bipartisan declaration, which now has over 130 signatories, was released two weeks ago, before today’s release from Keene, Barr and Norquist. While this could account for the lower profile of that statement, it’s still notable that this conservative civil liberties group appears far stronger on civil liberties than the Administration right now.

Olson told me that their view of the announcement from Eric Holder on Khalid Skeikh Mohammed’s terror trial was a “mixed bag,” because it included the use of military commissions for other terror suspects.

…you can see that interesting list of signatories to the declaration here. Any list that includes John Dean, Lawrence Wilkerson and Larry Craig (R-ID) is kind of interesting.