Today brought an interesting development in the ongoing debate over transferring Guantanamo Bay detainees to Illinois' Thompson Correction Facility.

A coalition of the country's foremost civil liberties groups have penned a letter to Congress urging them to hold off on the plan until they've first established a “permanent, statutory ban on using the Thomson facility for indefinite detention without charge or trial or for military commission-related detention.”  They go on to write: "Bringing the practice of indefinite detention without charge or trial to any location within the United States will further harm the rule of law and adherence to the Constitution."

As the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman writes, the message is clearly a "pained" one for these groups, who have fought for years to see Guantanamo closed, but feel the current Thompson plan would simply "entrench some of the most intolerable legal abuses of Guantanamo Bay in the name of ending it."