Ben Wittes looks at the House Armed Services' Committee meeting last Thursday and sees pretty much what I saw:
The major areas of potential common ground, reading only a bit between the lines, include: (1) a willingness to consider seriously reaffirming the AUMF; (2) a willingness to write detention authority into law; and (3) having a review process, presumably written in some form into statute. The major areas of friction include: (1) transfer restrictions, both with respect to people the administration means to free and with respect to those it wants to try in the United States; (2) the availability of non-military options for handling new captives (in other words, whether every new captive must be placed in military detention); and (3) the specific contours of the new review system, particularly as pertains to the role of attorneys for detainees.
My worry is that the administration is going to trade away some genuine concessions -- like a federal trial for the alleged 9/11 conspirators -- in exchange for Republicans not legislating something really dumb and unworkable, such as a requirement that all domestic terrorism cases involve the military. That part of the proposal should be dead in the water from jump.
