Are Habeas Decisions Trending the Government's Way?

In a recent article in the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg noted that the government has prevailed on the merits in three straight GTMO habeas proceedings and offered perspectives on what this might signify.  Could it be a change in the substantive grounds for detention?  Could it be a change in the procedural or evidentiary rules?  Is it simply a quirk of the sequence of decisions working through the system? On one hand, we should be wary of touting the significance of the sequence of decisions in these cases, just as we should be wary of touting the significance of the scorecard more generally.  The government at times has been on the losing end of cases in sequence, and at times on the winning end.  These sequences don't tell us much about what is going to happen next.  The far more interesting question is whether the content of these decisions reflects a change in the substantive, procedural, or evidentiary rules governing the habeas proceedings.   Substantive Detention Standard: Has this changed recently?  Well, in 2009 several of the district judges rejected the proposition that support independent from membership would count as a sufficient condition for detention (though Judge Bates, for example, was careful to note that support might well be evidence of functional membership, thus partially collapsing the two predicates into one).  Then, in January 2010, the Circuit's panel decision in al-Bihani stated that either membership or support could be used to justify detention.  The subsequent dicta-fication of other apsects of that panel opinion has not stopped the district judges more recently from quoting the membership-or-support standard specified by the panel, so one might conclude that the basic substantive test for detention has indeed been clarified in a direction that favors the government.  All that said, however, none of the three recent decisions turned on this question. Procedural/Evidentiary Rules: As Ben points out here, we can identify at least one important shift to the procedural/evidentiary ruls in the GTMO habeas cases, one that does indeed seem to have an impact:

[T]he courts have gone from avowedly refraining from holding a detainee’s unbelievable statements against him to considering a detainee’s lies as affirmative evidence of his detainability.

I think that is exactly right, and like Ben I think it could have a substantial impact going forward.  Time will tell.  Unfortunately, Carol's article may give the impression that Ben and I disagree on this point.  Carol quotes this language from Ben's post, and then follows it immediately with this language:

But Robert Chesney, a national security law expert at the University of Texas, says three in a row is likely ``a quirk of the sequencing of the cases.''

I think Ben and I are talking about two very different things here.  Ben was not saying that three most recent decisions were all produced by the Court's turn toward treating implausible accounts as inculpatory, and I was not saying that this turn was unimportant (let alone non-existent).