Today’s Headlines and Commentary

As Ben mentioned, there has been a landslide of coverage about this GAO report, released yesterday by Senator Dianne Feinstein, on housing Guantanamo detainees in the United States. Here are Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room, the Associated Press, Jennifer Rizzo of CNN’s Security Clearance blog, and Jeremy Herb of the Hill. There are other articles, but you can find those yourself.

As Wells has discussed here and here, the debate over detention provisions in the NDAA is back. Here is the amendment in question, and here is the Huffington Post on the senators that spoke in favor of it yesterday.

GOP Senator Susan Collins of Maine has also joined the raucous anti-Susan Rice caucus, report Scott Wong and Seung Min Kim of Politico. Andy Rosenthal of the New York Times offers his thoughts on the fight over Ms. Rice, and CNN’s Suzanne Kelly explains why Rice’s efforts to explain herself have failed so badly.

I vowed early on that I wouldn’t spend a moment discussing the still-developing David Petraeus---Paula Broadwell---Jill Kelly---John Allen scandal. I am hereby making an exception. This op-ed by Michael O’Hanlon of Brookings in the Baltimore Sun about Paula Broadwell’s character is interesting, and is more than just gossip.

Daniel Gaynor writes in Policy Mic about why sequestration will jeopardize our national security.

David Cole argues in the New York Review of Books that the drone rulebook the Obama administration had been working on before the election should have been finalized before anyone was targeted.

The Associated Press reports that Jose Padilla’s resentencing has been postponed to January 29th because his lawyer argues that he is deteriorating psychologically after years of solitary confinement. Padilla is to be resentenced because, as the AP puts it, the “11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Padilla’s original 17-year sentence was too lenient for a trained al-Qaida operative who also had a long criminal record as a Chicago gang member.”

Larry Shaughnessy of CNN’s Security Clearance blog has another update on WikiLeaker Bradley Manning’s pretrial hearing:

Pfc. Bradley Manning has begun testifying at his pretrial hearing about alleged abuse he suffered while held at Quantico Marine Corps base.

The Army private, accused of stealing thousands of classified documents that were then published online by WikiLeaks, spoke in a clear voice at the start of his testimony. He was wearing his Army service uniform and wire-rimmed glasses.

Manning's defense team wants to make the case that his harsh treatment in prison should count as time served and subtracted from whatever his eventual sentence is.

Earlier Thursday, a military judge ruled that new charges would have to be filed before Manning could enter a guilty plea to some lesser charges.

Charlie Savage of the Times discusses the lingering questions surrounding Adnan Latif’s death after the Pentagon officially concluded this week that his death was a suicide. Latif was a Guantanamo Bay detainee who has been at the detention facility since 2002 despite being cleared for repatriation.

Daniel Byman of Brookings describes the current state of Al Qaeda in the New Republic:

[R]eports of al Qaeda’s demise are both true and overstated. For as the President and his advisors contend, the core organization now led by Ayman al Zawahiri is on its heels, with key senior leaders dead and many others on the run or in hiding. But as jihadist attacks in Benghazi, Yemen, and elsewhere indicate, the broader movement is alive and in some places prospering.

From the Frenemy Press: Zulfiqar Ali of the Pakistani Express Tribune reports that the U.S. has resumed drone strikes in the FATA post-U.S. presidential election. Two suspected militants have been killed in South Waziristan.

And, from a self-described “combat journalist” in Afghanistan, comes this picture of daily life in the country: it’s Today’s Moment of Zen.

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