A bill Graham quietly introduced last week would set standards and rules for legal challenges brought by prisoners at Guantanamo as well as other suspected enemy fighters whom U.S. forces may capture in the future.

Analysts said Graham’s unilateral action indicated his negotiations with the White House aren’t likely to bear fruit anytime soon. Graham, they say, may have concluded that filing formal legislation was the best way to pressure the administration into a position on the politically sensitive issue.

Graham’s Terrorist Detention Review Reform Act would, for the first time, have Congress define a profile for an enemy combatant subject to detention, determine how much evidence the government needs to keep a prisoner locked up and authorize courts hearing such cases to consider involuntary statements made by detainees on the battlefield.

Habeas corpus reform has been one of the parts of a so-called grand bargain on Guantanamo-related issues that are the subject of negotiations among Graham, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and White House counsel Bob Bauer.

A White House spokesman declined to speak in detail, but one official said the bill Graham filed was not the product of the senator’s discussions with the administration. There was no indication that Graham’s habeas bill would help resolve the standoff between Congress and the White House, a stalemate that has stalled President Barack Obama’s plans to close Guantanamo Bay and move some detainees to a maximum-security state prison in Illinois.

While Graham’s talks with the White House have been the focus of considerable attention in POLITICO, The New Yorker and elsewhere, his introduction of the habeas bill just before the Senate left for its August recess was unusually low-key for terrorism-related legislation. Graham didn’t hold a news conference, didn’t issue a press release or even a statement; the bill listed no co-sponsors when it was filed Aug. 4. A spokeswoman said Graham was unavailable for comment for this story.

Graham said in February that he and the White House were in discussions about habeas reform because several federal judges were frustrated that Congress had given the courts no clear guidance on how to resolve cases brought by Guantanamo prisoners.

“The judges are just absolutely beside themselves,” Graham told reporters at the time. “I think that is something new the administration is listening to — the judiciary. ... I do believe there is a willingness by some in the administration to sit down and reform our habeas statutes.”

More recently, Graham aides have indicated that the administration has essentially gone silent in the terrorism-related talks. Some observers suspect nearly all war-on-terror policy proposals have become caught up in internal disagreements within the administration over where to try suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks, and fears that such talk would draw negative attention and hurt Democrats in the November midterm elections.

Civil liberties groups and lawyers for Guantanamo prisoners immediately criticized Graham’s bill. However, several advocates who follow the issue said the main impetus behind it has largely evaporated, after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a series of recent rulings that resolved earlier lower-court disagreements.

“It would be odd to push this now that the D.C. Circuit is really clarifying the rules,” said Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. “The pragmatic arguments for [legislation] are becoming less and less forceful as time goes and the pragmatic arguments against it are becoming greater and greater. This would create another novel and confusing set of rules people have no experience implementing.”

One controversial aspect of the legislation — and a feature that may have contributed to the White House’s apparent decision to let Graham act alone — is that it explicitly applies to terrorist suspects the U.S. may detain in the future. That could be seen as a step towards preventive detention law, something that civil liberties and human rights groups have adamantly opposed.

The White House had hoped to dodge or at least dampen that fight by limiting the scope of any legislation to the remaining 180 or so Guantanamo inmates. However, Graham has insisted that any legislation on detention authority address future captures as well.

The bill would apply to anyone whom the federal government seeks to detain as an “unprivileged enemy belligerent” — including U.S. citizens. It could also apply to anyone apprehended on U.S. soil, since there is no geographic limitation.

However, one expert who helped Graham craft the legislation said the intent isn’t to create preventive detention law or broad new detention authority. “It actually doesn’t authorize any detention that wasn’t authorized before,” said Ben Wittes of the Brookings Institution, who also worked with University of Texas Law Professor Bobby Chesney on the bill, though they have not endorsed all aspects of Graham’s measure.

Asked whether the bill has missed its political moment, Wittes said he doesn’t know whether it ever had one, because Graham “is the only voice for something that really should be a matter of political consensus.”

“The administration hasn’t been able to get its act together to give a serious response,” Wittes said. Republicans, he added, “have been too busy demagoguing the issue to engage seriously and the Democrats have just abandoned the field.”

The Obama administration has based its authority to detain prisoners at Guantanamo on the law of war and the authorization of force resolution Congress passed a week after the Sept. 11 attacks. However, that resolution doesn’t explicitly mention detention of enemy fighters, and its application to violent anti-American extremist groups that had no connection to the 2001 attacks — or didn’t even exist then — is murky.

A prominent lawyer for Guantanamo detainees, Sabin Willett, said he is most troubled by an aspect of the bill that allows the president to detain anyone who belongs to groups he determines are “associated forces” of the Taliban or Al Qaeda. The bill says courts must grant “the utmost deference” to the president on that point, which means courts are unlikely to challenge it.

“That’s pretty scary and ought to be pretty darn objectionable to Congress as an institution. Congress is lodged in the Constitution with the power to say who we’re at war against,” Willett said. “Embedded in this thing is a perpetual declaration of war that’s pretty astonishing. How far from ‘1984’ is this? We’re always at war and always at war against whoever the president says we’re at war against?”

Willett stressed that he was not opposed to some revision of the 2001 resolution but finds Graham’s proposal too open-ended. “I think everyone probably thinks it makes sense for Congress to clarify who we’re at war against, but they can’t delegate that to some other branch of government,” Willett said.

Wittes warned that the rules set by the courts are still uncertain and could be upset by future rulings, including the intervention of the Supreme Court. He said the bill should have some appeal to those advocating for detainees because it would set in law the requirement that the government prove a detainee’s affiliation or actions and do so by a preponderance of the evidence. In a recent decision, the D.C. Circuit suggested that just some evidence might be enough to detain a suspected Al Qaeda member.

“They’ve signaled very clearly they’re uncomfortable with a preponderance of the evidence standard,” Wittes said. “They’ve basically opened an invitation to [challenging] that. That would be enormously destabilizing.”