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.

Rather effin’ lucky, I’d say.

Make no mistake, not only did Sen. Wyden get this colloquy into the Senate record, but there appear to have been several threats hiding behind the Senate blather. DiFi has said she thinks the way to fix a secret law is to change it in a secret committee meeting. But Wyden et al have made it clear that if she doesn’t agree to fix it in her secret committee meeting, he will try to do so on the Senate floor.

There is still bipartisanship in Washington when something like depriving civil liberties in the name of Terror has to get done. We may have killed Osama bin Laden, but we have yet to slay the Boogeyman.

If documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act do pertain to Hassan Ghul (and Reuters appears to suggest they do), then Ghul was likely not in CIA custody until July 2004. That is, it appears Ghul was not turned over to exclusive CIA custody until six months after he was captured. His initial torture approval came on August 2, and his second torture approval came on August 26.

It seems to me we’re never going to see that report until after the eight-year statute of limitations on torture expire for everything described in the report that clearly exceeded John Yoo’s expansive interpretation of what constitutes torture.

A year and a half ago, I warned that if you bought certain beauty supplies — hydrogen peroxide and acetone — you might be a terrorism suspect. Shortly thereafter, John Kyl basically confirmed that the government had been tracking certain people buying hydrogen peroxide. Yesterday, FBI Director Robert Mueller did so in even more explicit terms.

If you blink today, you may miss the House of Representatives passing an extension until the end of the year of several provisions of the Patriot Act that expire in February. They will try to pass it under the suspension of the rules, meaning that they will need a 2/3 vote, but also that nobody can offer amendments. And they will spend a whopping 40 minutes of debate on the topic.

There are just 14 WikiLeak cables in this database mentioning both Egypt and bloggers (out of 325 that mention Egypt) but just one–dated March 30, 2009–that talks in detail about the actual content of blogs rather than Mubarak’s persecution of them as a human rights issue.

A statement from individuals across the ideological spectrum that there is simply no place in our federal budget for wasteful, ineffective spending that is basically just corporate welfare. This is what good trans-partisanship looks like. And it is remarkably rare.