The Obama Administration may still veto the bill, since this punting to the Supreme Court on this one aspect does not address their point, which isn’t really opposition to indefinite detention as much as it is opposition to having Congress dictate detention policy at all. They already operate under the premise that the US can indefinitely detain terrorist suspects, and they want that power maintained in the executive branch rather than codified into law.

The Obama administration is using U.S. vessels to hold ghost prisoners. We don’t even know how many. The old bad days of the Bush administration are back, and the details aren’t pretty, and the outstanding questions about what is really going on are many.

This was the first vote on the Afghan war since the killing of Osama bin Laden. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi gave it a huge boost by announcing she would vote for it this morning, in defiance of the Obama Administration’s strategy.

The last time Congress voted on withdrawal from Afghanistan was on March 17, and withdrawal got 93 votes, including 8 from Republicans. Since then, Osama bin Laden has been killed in a counter-terrorism mission in Pakistan, taking some of the rationale for war away. Several members in both parties have since questioned the mission in Afghanistan and whether the pace of withdrawal could be accelerated.

Used to be, when you vanquished your enemy, you declared victory and went home.

John Bellinger has been publicly suggesting the Obama Administration had exceeded the terms of the AUMF for some time. So it is unsurprising that he took the opportunity of a Republican House, the incoming Armed Services Chair’s explicit support for a new AUMF, and the Ghailani verdict to more fully develop his argument in an op-ed. It’s a well-crafted op-ed, such as in the way it avoids explicitly saying the government has been breaking the law in its pursuit of terrorism, when he pretends the only people we’ve been targeting in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia are al Qaeda leaders.

The incoming Chair of the House Armed Services Committee Bud McKeon wants to revisit and expand the 2001 AUMF authorizing our war against al Qaeda.

As I tweeted and wrote for Danger Room today, the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon, briefly argued in a speech today that Congress should “reaffirm — in statute — the Authorization to Use Military Force of 2011.” To expand on that: McKeon mentioned the AUMF in the context of detainee policy — that is, to keep terrorism detainees out of federal courts. But it clearly goes beyond that. Here’s what a McKeon aide told me.

Fresh off exempting Yemen from any sanctions for its use of child soldiers and partly in response to this week’s attempted package bombings, the government appears to be ready to let the CIA start operating drones in Yemen.

You see, from the start this war was designed to be our longest war. Because all those Commander-in-Chief powers both Republicans and Democrats have grown to love so much depend on it continuing.