The Obama administration indicated to reporters this week that long-awaited action codifying the Bush-era policy of indefinite detention for suspected terrorists would be put in place through executive order. This is both very bad and an improvement over the status quo. Rather than abandoning indefinite detention, President Obama is seeking simply to make the process fairer. The coming proposal improves on the Bush administration detention review process in that it would reportedly be more adversarial - detainees would be represented by a lawyer, and the boards would be made up of more than just military officials. The process would be, as The New York Times describes it, basically a kind of 'parole board' for suspected terrorists. The use of indefinite military detention in armed conflict is well-established, but it's not clear whether those who would be detained under this policy are 'battlefield captures' or whether military detention is a smoke screen for holding indefinitely people who should be charged with a crime or released. Complicating this is the reality that the fight with al-Qaida has no defined endpoint. The administration could argue that by using an executive order, it's avoiding more constraints on detainee rights than would probably be the result of going through a Republican Congress. An executive order means that indefinite detention isn't a 'permanent' fixture of U.S. law. As University of Texas law professor Robert Chesney told ProPublica, an executive order 'doesn't have staying power if the next administration doesn't want it.' The danger is that the fight against al-Qaida may be endless, and it's hard to remember a president willingly ceding executive power. One question is whether the proposal would apply merely to the Bush administration 'legacy cases' at Guantanamo, which include individuals difficult to try in either military or civilian forums because of abuse they endured during the Bush administration, or future cases as well. While indefinite detention would officially become part of the Obama administration's national security policy, the proposal also provides a ray of hope for those detainees who have lost their habeas cases and are being held indefinitely with little chance of release. The proposal is basically what we've come to expect from the Obama administration on security and civil liberties. Having promised to reverse the trajectory of Bush-era national security policies, Obama has settled on making them marginally more lawful and humane. It's not nothing, but it's not what Obama promised - or what much of the left hoped for. Excerpted from the 'Plum Line' blog at www.washingtonpost.com Adam Serwer, a staff writer at the American Prospect, is an occasional contributor to the PlumLine. 