The federal law makes it illegal to make and sell commercially “any visual or auditory depiction” of the killing or serious abuse of a living animal so long as that conduct is illegal.

Deputy U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal, appealing to the Court to reinstate the law, which was struck down by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, explained that Congress intended to shut down “a robust market” for “crush videos” — images of small animals being stomped to death.  The law, said Katyal, was a “narrowly targeted restriction.”

But Denniston reports that most of the Justices did not appear to be buying his argument. They tossed out a series of hypotheticals asking what would be banned under the law — from videos of bull-fighting to the making of foie gras — to suggest that Congress overreached on this one. Only Justice Samuel Alito, writes Denniston, seemed prepared to support the law as it was written.

As Spencer wrote today, someone in the administration told ProPublica’s Dafna Linzner and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn that yes, civil liberties groups support the idea of an order that “would embrace claims by former President George W. Bush that certain people can be detained without trial for long periods under the laws of war.” That statement amazed the civil liberties groups that Spencer then spoke to. I’ve gotten similar reactions from civil liberties lawyers I’ve been speaking to since Friday as well.

But it turns out that there are some progressives, and some who’d even traditionally be called civil libertarians — though not representatives of the traditional civil liberties groups Spencer and I have spoken to — who have been floating the idea, but in a more limited way than the Post story suggested.

Specifically, a group of prominent military and criminal defense lawyers and academics on June 8 sent President Obama a letter urging him not to create a new system of preventive detention, but instead, to rely on the one we already have — with modifications, if necessary. Although they don’t specifically recommend an executive order, that’s the logical way for the administration to modify and clarify its authority.

“Our country can achieve its legitimate goals through existing laws which authorize the detention of those who should be detained in the fight against international terrorism,” says the letter, which I received just this afternoon. It’s signed by 11 prominent lawyers, including Retired Rear Admirals Donald Guter and John Hutson of the Navy’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps; Abner Mikva, a former federal appellate court judge, University of Chicago law professor, White House counsel under President Bill Clinton and a mentor to president Obama; and Thomas Wilner, a prominent corporate defense lawyer who’s represented Guantanamo detainees in some of the landmark cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Longstanding law-of-war principles authorize the detention for the duration of armed hostilities of those who engage in armed conflict against the United States or its allies,” these experts write, adding: “Some modifications to the existing system may be warranted, but no new system is necessary.”

The letter specifically tries to steer President Obama away from proposing or supporting any new legislation that would create a new preventive detention authority.

Ken Gude at the influential Center for American Progress has also suggested that the president should clarify his authority of detention under the laws of war. In a recent memo he co-authored with Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies, he and Martin write that the “ambiguities” left by the Bush administration over who is detainable under the laws of war “compound the lack of fundamental fairness in treating suspected criminals as combatants and holding them without trial.” Given how the detention authority has been used over the past eight years, “the new administration should now reassert the traditional understanding of the limits of the law of war and reject the former administration’s effort to read the word “organization” in the AUMF [Authorization for the Use of Military Force] as effecting an unprecedented extension of the traditional understanding of the military’s extraordinary powers of detention during war.”

In an e-mail this afternoon that he sent from Paris, Gude says he never specifically proposed an executive order, but supports the idea and adamantly opposes new legislation.

Gude laid out his support publicly for a limited system of preventive detention, authorized by the laws of war which allow detention of combatants during a military conflict, on CAP’s site and in The Guardian.

Even David Cole, the normally staunch civil libertarian law professor at Georgetown, has argued that the administration has that authority, calling it “an appropriate and necessary means of dealing with enemy fighters during wartime.” (Cole was pilloried for taking that position by Kenneth Anderson in Opinio Juris, who asks, “if it’s sensible and legal now, why wasn’t it sensible and legal during the Bush years? Is this the same David Cole who appeared on panels with me over the last few years and who didn’t seem in those years to have any daylight between him and the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, or Human Rights First on the principle of try-or-release?”)

Let’s set aside for now the very legitimate question of whether these progressive civil libertarians would have taken the same position during the Bush years, or if they just inherently trust President Obama to handle battlefield detention against a non-traditional enemy better than Bush did. The positions these people are taking is informed, at least, by what the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, although that case pertained only to the detention of Taliban fighters, while we were at war with Afghanistan. And it’s in line with what the federal courts have been ruling, with some variations, in a string of habeas corpus cases.

The proposal for an executive order to clarify the Obama administration’s position on the extent of its wartime authorities of preventive detention is very different, however, from the controverisal position that some more conservative lawyers and think-tank scholars like Jack Goldsmith, Benjamin Wittes and Neal Katyal (traditionally a moderate Democrat and now deputy solicitor general in the Obama administration) have been promoting. The Wittes proposal released on Friday with Brookings colleague Colleen Peppard, for example, would create an entirely new system of preventive detention that’s not limited to the president’s authority under the laws of war.

On Monday, Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor and former head of the Office of Legal Counsel at DOJ under President Bush, joined Wittes, a Brookings scholar, in a Washington Post op-ed to argue that a preventive detention scheme should be debated in Congress and spelled out clearly through legislation, not by the president by executive order. To them, an executive order would be “a nearly wholesale adoption of the Bush administration’s unilateral approach to detention.”

That, it seems, is where the current debate lies. Committed civil liberties advocates such as the ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch and others may still be arguing against a preventive detention scheme entirely, but given that the Obama administration has consistently argued its right to detain “combatants” (however they’re defined) during what it continues to call a “war” — not only in the Gitmo habeas cases but in regards to the detention of some 600 men imprisoned at the U.S. Air base in Bagram, Afghanistan — it’s impossible to imagine that the administration is going give up that authority in the future.

Although as Spencer pointed out, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs did say on Monday that the president is not considering issuing an order that “relies on legal theories that we have the inherent authority to detain people,” he certainly didn’t rule out basing a preventive detention system on some other authority — whether granted by the laws of war, or by an act of Congress.

I’ll be writing more soon about what that Congressional act might look like.

On Tuesday, senior Obama foreign policy adviser Denis McDonough said that while Obama agreed the Guantanamo prison should be closed, there was “absolutely no truth to reports that a decision has been made about how and where to try the detainees, and there is no process in place to make that decision until [Obama’s] national security and legal teams are assembled.”

Still, the apparent leak that Obama was even considering a special court system was a step into a legal policy minefield.

Advocates on all sides have staked out strong positions on the matter: the ACLU and a bipartisan coalition created by the Constitution Project, along with some lawyers who have represented detainees at Guantanamo Bay, make a strong case that specially-created national-security courts are unnecessary and likely unconstitutional. And Human Rights First has issued a study demonstrating that the federal court system works just fine for prosecuting terrorists.

Meanwhile, the neo-conservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a group started after 9/11 that includes former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, supports creating special courts.

So does Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith, who served briefly as director of the Justice Dept.’s Office of Legal Counsel before resigning and writing his book, “The Terror Presidency,” which includes a scathing critique of the Bush administration’s legal analysis and policies on the treatment of detainees.

But it’s not just conservatives that support a special court system to try suspected terrorists. Moderate liberals like Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal, who represented Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan, before the U.S. Supreme Court, and later at his military commission trial, has written in favor of creating special courts to try suspected terrorists, and even their “preventive detention.”

Harvard Law Professor and Obama adviser Laurence Tribe has written (with Katyal) that the use of military tribunals to try suspected terrorists could be constitutional and even wise, so long as they’re authorized by Congress and comport with constitutional commands.

How a President Obama is going to weigh all these different viewpoints remains to be seen. As I pointed out yesterday, the challenge Obama faces is made far more difficult because of the harsh interrogation methods used against suspected terrorists, or “enemy combatants,” as the Bush administration calls them. The problem is that evidence obtained by coercion isn’t admissible in regular U.S. courts; but letting potential terrorists go, possibly to strike again, isn’t a politically acceptable option for a new president.

Then again, a special court created to accommodate the torture problem and even permit preventive detention of suspected warriors would set a troubling precedent that we’d be stuck with for many years to come.