After its FBI Director told Congress that the revisions to the defense authorization bill did not satisfy his concerns with the bill, the White House issued a statement of Administration policy saying that they would not veto the bill, despite an earlier threat.

Two major year-end pieces of legislation were readied yesterday, and in this case, House and Senate negotiators reached agreement on the measures, expecting to pass them by the end of the week. First, appropriators agreed to a $1 trillion omnibus spending bill covering the rest of the fiscal year (to September 30 of next year) on domestic spending. They also agreed on the defense spending bill, which still allows indefinite detention of suspects.

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.

Mark Udall’s amendment to strip out indefinite detention provisions from the defense authorization bill failed today, and the bill will likely pass the Senate with the provisions intact. This sets up a possible, but not certain, Obama veto.

Fifty European parliament members have signed a letter to US officials, including the President, members of the Senate and House and Department of Defense, to express concern about US government treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused whistleblower to WikiLeaks.

Every year the Defense Authorization includes some big controversy. This time it’s provision measure that would mandate indefinite detentions of terrorist suspects in military custody and open the door for those indefinite detentions to extend to US citizens. Mark Udall is trying to strip out that provision.

Even in the Era of New Dysfunction, Congress usually manages to pass a defense authorization bill. The forces of nature demand that the war machine gets to set its budgets on time, even if the budgets for food stamps, welfare, the NIH, the Department of Education, etc., have to sit on pins and needles and [...]

We never really got a clean sense of the rebels who NATO helped to bring to power in Libya. That picture is becoming slightly clearer.

Just a few years ago, the national debate over the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, indefinite detention, secret renditions and other legal elements of the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror” happened openly in American courtrooms and in the daily newspapers. Increasingly, those debates have receded into the rearview mirror as we content ourselves with the illusion that these issues are no longer urgent, or no longer affect us. In his thoughtful new book, Habeas Corpus After 9/11, Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall University School of Law, reminds us that these and other legal innovations in the War on Terror are neither resolved, nor isolated, nor benign. We are still living in the legal universe that was constructed on the fly after 9/11. We just don’t want to admit it.

The government argues that, in spite of the fact that Saifullah Paracha’s Gitmo Detainee Assessment Brief was leaked in April, his lawyer, David Remes, cannot talk about it. Because if he did, we might conclude the DAB was real.