As part of our never-ending quest to present a dramatis personae in the preventive-detention debate, I published a piece yesterday about civil liberties groups lining up to oppose an Obama administration scheme for such detentions. My Washington Independent colleague Daphne Eviatar, who I consider to be among the game’s top legal-affairs journalists, reports on an added complexity: members in good standing of the civil liberties community who have written to the administration’s detentions task force contending that a new system for detentions doesn’t have to be established:

“Our country can achieve its legitimate goals through existing laws which authorize the detention of those who should be detained in the fight against international terrorism,” says the letter, which has not been released publicly but was obtained by TWI. The letter is signed by eleven prominent lawyers, including Retired Rear Admirals Donald Guter and John Hutson of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps; Abner Mikva, a former federal appellate court judge, University of Chicago law professor, White House counsel under President Bill Clinton and a mentor to president Obama; and Thomas Wilner, a corporate defense lawyer who’s represented Guantanamo detainees in some of the landmark cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

 Some of the members of that faction tell Daphne that they’d back an executive order only as a way of forestalling a worse and overbroad system for preventive detention. Go read.