senate armed services committee

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) might have postponed this week’s planned Senate Armed Services Committee briefing on the Fort Hood shooting after President Obama asked Congress to await the results of ongoing Army and FBI inquiries. But today the committee will go forward with a closed-door briefing on Fort Hood, held at the Russell office building [...]

Just released from the Senate Armed Services Committee staff:
Today’s Senate Armed Services Committee briefing on the shooting incident at Fort Hood, Texas, has been postponed. The committee will send out a notice when the new date for the briefing has been scheduled.
In the aftermath of the Fort Hood shooting, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the [...]

The briefing, according to a release from the committee, will be entirely closed to the public. Presumably Nidal Malik Hasan’s intercepted communications with al-Qaeda affiliates will be discussed. It all goes down, with testimony from Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey and Army Secretary John McHugh, on Monday, Nov. 16.

Not that this was in any real doubt, even after the admiral’s dust-up last week over Afghanistan troop levels with Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, but the committee just unanimously voted out Adm. Michael Mullen’s nomination for another two years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [...]

A military judge’s ruling that U.S. officers used “cruel and inhuman” treatment and possibly “torture” on an Afghan teenager imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay provides strong support for the argument that the government should embark on a broader investigation of the treatment of “war on terror” detainees during the Bush administration.

For years, public diplomacy — and its uniformed cousin, ’strategic communications’ — has been discussed in Washington like a mantra: just find the most authentic ways of telling the “story” of the United States or of particularly unpopular U.S. actions, and suddenly people will realize that they just misunderstood America and problem solved. Critics countered [...]

The Senate Armed Services Committee voted yesterday to send the nomination of Rep. John McHugh (R-N.Y.) to become the next Army secretary to the full Senate, making his confirmation imminent. (Alas, he still hasn’t clarified his Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell position.) So Pete Geren, the current Army secretary, takes to the Army’s blog to say [...]

The Obama administration’s Detention Policy Task Force has issued a preliminary report recommending that Guantanamo Bay detainees be tried in federal court for criminal violations, if possible, and in military commissions if they’ve violated the laws of war.  But the big decisions about future detention policy, and issuance of a final report, have been postponed [...]

I asked the American Civil Liberties Union’s Chris Anders, a military commissions opponent, to react to Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson’s indication that the administration might consider detaining someone even after he’s been acquitted of wrongdoing in court. In replying, Anders pointed to another exchange from the Senate Armed Services Committee that I had neglected:
Jeh [...]

Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson moved the Obama administration into new territory from a civil liberties perspective. Asked by Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) the politically difficult but entirely fair question about whether terrorism detainees acquitted in courts could be released in the United States, Johnson said that “as a matter of legal authority,” the [...]