GOP aides are criticizing the House Republicans’ partisan witch-hunt over the Obama administration’s handling of the attacks on a U.S. diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya last year, arguing that the Party should focus more on substantive issues, such as lessons learned and how to recalibrate diplomatic security.

Roll Call reports that Republican aides are saying staffers are getting bogged down chasing bogus accusations.

“We have got to get past that and figure out what are we going to do going forward,” a GOP aide told Roll Call. “Some of the accusations, I mean you wouldn’t believe some of this stuff. It’s just — I mean, you’ve got to be on Mars to come up with some of this stuff.” Another aide expressed frustration at accusations that military assets weren’t properly deployed during the night of the attacks and that a team from Tripoli could have been flown in to fight off the attackers:

“There are some real issues there and then there is just some crazy stuff,” the senior House GOP aide said. “The crazy stuff is, you know, the airman in Ramstein [Air Base, Germany,] that knew that the Predator [drone] was armed. There are no armed Predators in the region there. The [status of forces agreement] does not allow us to fly them armed, and everybody knows it.” [...]

GOP aides described another criticism aired at a recent House Oversight Committee hearing that there were four security officers at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli who were ordered to remain in the capital for several hours after the first reports of an attack, rather than being scrambled to assist the consulate in Benghazi.

“The stand-down order was for four guys,” the GOP aide said. “When you step back and say how were the people killed at the annex, they were killed by an indirect fire mortar round. Four more M-4s [rifles] inside the annex doesn’t change that outcome. In fact, they might have just created more casualties. We have got to get down to what really happened on the DoD side and for us the DoD side was not properly postured, why?”

It appears that some Republicans are also beginning to see that the GOP’s Benghazi affair isn’t paying dividends. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell backed away from some Republicans’ baseless claims of an Obama White House cover-up. And Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) in an interview on Fox News on Monday warned his colleagues about taking the issue too far:

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A Department of Defense official said on Thursday that the war against Al Qaeda could last far longer than Obama administration officials have previously predicted in public, saying that it could continue on for another “ten to twenty years.”

The Senate Armed Services Committee today held its first hearing on whether or not to revise or rewrite the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) questioned one of the witnesses, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations Michael Sheehan, about how long he foresaw the war against Al Qaeda will extend for. The answer was much longer than the twelve years that the AUMF has already been in place:

GRAHAM: Do you agree with me the war against radical Islam, or terror, or whatever description you like to provide, will go on after the second term of President Obama?

SHEEHAN: Senator, in my judgement, this is going to go on for quite awhile, yes, beyond the second term of the President.

GRAHAM: And beyond this term of Congress?

SHEEHAN: Yes, sir. I think it’s at least ten to twenty years.

GRAHAM: I think you’re absolutely right. I think we’re involved in a generational struggle.

That response appears to contradict former Pentagon lawyer Jeh Johnson’s comments in January. At the time, Johnson said the fight against Al Qaeda “shouldn’t be regarded as a perpetual war without any sort of end.” Likewise, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said in January that the targeted killing program authorized under the AUMF is “not something that we’re going to have to continue to use forever.” While Sheehan’s comments today put a more definite end date on the AUMF’s authority, they are far further in the future than Johnson and Panetta’s comments would lead one to believe.

Passed in the aftermath of 9/11, the law gave the President broad authority to target “those nations, organizations, or persons” who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the 2001 attack. Since then, that authority has been used as the basis for conducting military actions around the world, including not only in Afghanistan, but also in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. At present, the AUMF is criticized for being overly broad in its wording and used to target individuals who had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks, leading to conflicting moves in Congress to either narrow or expand its scope.

The Obama administration does have some say, however, in when the AUMF’s authority expires. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) asked the panel what, other than Congress revoking the AUMF, could shut down the battle against Al Qaeda. “If the President were to issue a declaration stating that the conflict against Al Qaeda has been concluded, I would think that would constitute an end,” the Pentagon’s acting general counsel Robert Taylor said, opening the door to just such a move from President Obama or some future administration.

A group of human rights organizations is calling on Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel to abandon force-feeding hunger striking detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg reports:

The American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Victims of Torture, Human Rights Watch and 17 other groups wrote the Pentagon on Monday … [calling] Guantánamo’s force-feeding process “inherently cruel, inhuman, and degrading.”

“We urgently request that you order the immediate and permanent cessation of all force-feeding of Guantánamo prisoners who are competent and capable of forming a rational judgment as to the consequences of refusing food,” they wrote.

The letter also asked Hagel to allow “independent medical professionals” access to the prison to “review and monitor the status of hunger-striking prisoners in a manner consistent with international ethical standards.”

While other groups like the American Medical Association and the Constitution Project’s task force on terror detainees have also condemned force-feeding at Gitmo, the rights groups’ letter comes after Al-Jazeera reported on Monday the contents of the Guantanamo Bay Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for managing hunger strikes at the prison. The documents illustrate “a brutal and dehumanising medical procedure that requires [detainees] to wear masks over their mouths while they sit shackled in a restraint chair for as long as two hours.”

A lawyer representing several Gitmo prisoners said last week that “detainees have described the experience of having the tube snaked down your throat as being like having a razor blade pulled down.” The lawyer, David Remes, said the military uses force-feeding to prevent detainees from becoming martyrs.

The SOP makes clear that the prison commander, not doctors and nurses, has the final authority regarding whether a detainee is to be force-fed and that only “reasonable efforts” are needed to get consent from a hunger striking detainee to begin force-feeding.

Leonard Rubenstein, a lawyer at the Center for Public Health and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Heath and the Berman Institute of Bioethics, told Al-Jazeera that the SOP is “Orwellian.”

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The Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services committee said he is hoping to get more Democrats to co-sponsor a bill he introduced last week that seeks to provide oversight over the Obama administration’s counterterrorism policies.

Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) introduced the Oversight of Sensitive Military Operations Act, which requires the Secretary of Defense to notify the House and Senate Armed Services committees, and their subcommittees, of kill or capture operations (or a “sensitive military operation”) aimed at suspected al-Qaeda militants after the operation in question has taken place.

The bill defines a “sensitive military operation” as “a lethal operation or capture operation conducted by the armed forces outside the United States” and outside of Afghanistan, as the measure assumes that military operations there fall under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Thornberry clarified to Breaking Defense that his measure does not limit oversight “to any part of the military or to any particular technology,” including the use of drones.

Currently, the bill has mostly Republican co-sponsors but the Texas Republican said that’s likely due to lobbying logistics. It “is solely a function of how fast the emails got around,” he said, adding that now that he has the support from House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Adam Smith (D-WA) and Rep. James Langevin (D-RI), a subcommittee ranking member, more Democrats will likely sign on. “The numbers don’t reflect the opinion about it,” Thornberry said.

He also said that he is not intending to hamstring the military. “Congress will never be in position, nor should it be, to make operational decisions — ‘OK, you should capture that person, you should kill that person’ — that’s not our role,” he said. “If it’s a larger scale military conflict,” Thornberry added, “we understand the military can’t come running over to us over every few seconds.”

But, he said, his bill would give Members of Congress “the opportunity to complain about it if we don’t think that it’s justified, or if we believe that some operations are outside the bounds or even [just] a bad idea….Then we have opportunities to restrict funding or to change the authorization or to have a closed hearing on the matter. If [we] have the information, then Congress has a number of tools to use.”

Harold Koh, the former top State Department in the Obama administration, recently criticized the lack of transparency in the White House’s targeted killing program — one that has included a ramped up use of drones throughout the last four years. “It has not been sufficiently transparent to the media, to Congress, and to our allies,” he said last week, adding that it is “fostering a growing perception that the program is not lawful and necessary, but illegal, unnecessary and out of control.”

Another former Obama administration official, former DOD counsel Jeh Johnson, similarly criticized the secrecy surrounding Obama’s counterterrorism polices. “The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy,” he said.

Thornberry told Breaking Defense that this is what his bill is trying to address. “Under this framework, it lets Congress push back,” he said.

The State Department’s former top lawyer on Tuesday offered an at times scathing critique of the Obama adminsitration’s lack of transparency related to the use of drones and other tools in waging a campaign of targeted killingn against alleged al-Qaeda operatives.

Harold Koh, who served in the role of State Department General Counsel throughout President Obama’s first term, delivered a speech at Oxford University titled “How to End the Forever War?” Given the title, Koh’s talk covered a multitude of legal questions surrounding the U.S. government’s ongoing fight against terrorism. Koh said he believed that the Obama administration had gotten off to a good start in its pursuit of terrorists, pointing to the President’s 2009 Nobel Prize speech and his Executive Orders on transparency.

“But since then, to be candid, this Administration has not done enough to be transparent about legal standards and the decisionmaking process that it has been applying,” Koh said, singling out the drone policy as an example of how the lack of transparency from the White House and other parts of the Executive Branch have alienated the American people:

KOH: It has not been sufficiently transparent to the media, to Congress, and to our allies. Because the Administration has been so opaque, a left-right coalition running from Code Pink to Rand Paul has now spoken out against the drone program, fostering a growing perception that the program is not lawful and necessary, but illegal, unnecessary and out of control.

The Administration must take responsibility for this failure, because its persistent and counterproductive lack of transparency has led to the release of necessary pieces of its public legal defense too little and too late.

Koh made certain not to cast drones themselves as “inherently evil” and to stress that he was not opposed to their use within the laws of war. But he insisted that Obama follow through on his promises and “make public and transparent its legal standards and institutional processes for targeting and drone strikes.” The administration should also, according to Koh, explain why and when Americans can be targeted under the law, clarify how it counts civilian casualties from drone strikes, and release records on those instances where strikes were carried out against a target of questionable value.

Koh isn’t the first former Obama administration official to offer criticism of the targeted killing program. Former Department of Defense counsel Jeh Johnson in March told an audience at Fordham University, “The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy. In the absence of an official picture of what our government is doing, and by what authority, many in the public fill the void by envisioning the worst.” Koh also echoed Johnson’s own engagement at Oxford in declaring that the war against Al Qaeda can’t go on forever.

Koh’s statements on the need for more transparancy closely mirror those of CAP Chair John Podesta, as published in a March op-ed. In that piece, Podesta called on President Obama to “[r]elease the legal guidance governing your targeted killing programs, including the justifications for targeting Americans, and take charge of the informed, free and vigorous debate that undoubtedly will follow.”

President Obama’s renewed calls to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are already being met with promises of further stonewalling from Republicans in Congress, before a new plan can even be put forward.

It’s not new that Republicans oppose the idea that closing a prison that has been for years now a symbol of U.S. disregard for human rights would be in the interests of the United States, having blocked administration proposals several times. And now, Republicans are already shooting down Obama’s renewed push, mostly based on previous proposals to transport detainees to “supermax” prisons in the United States:

• Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY): “There is wide, bipartisan opposition in Congress to the president’s goal of moving those terrorists to American cities and towns.”
• Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC): “[The detainees are] individuals hell-bent on our destruction and destroying our way of life.”
• Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL): “All of the prisoners housed at Guantanamo are terrorists. They pose an obvious threat to our national security, and they should not be allowed to set foot on our soil.”
• Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN): “The American people expect us to keep them safe. I have yet to hear one good reason why moving these terrorists from off our shores right into the heart of our country makes us safer.”
• Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN): “The president needs to realize that the Global War on Terrorism did not end with the killing of Osama bin Laden. The Boston bombing is a sharp reminder that there is still a clear and present threat to our American way of life from those that mean us harm.”
• Rep. Jimmy Duncan (R-TN): “[Detainees] are not U.S. citizens and should not be given the same rights and privileges as if they were. [...] I do not support any plan for these prisoners that puts them on U.S. soil.”

The insistence that Guantanamo’s current population of 166 detainees must remain in place rather than reach U.S. soil is in itself based on a flawed premise. More than 200 international terrorists are currently serving out sentences in super-maximum security facilities in the United States, and — counter to GOP theories about the consequences of transferring detainees to the mainland — no convicted terrorist has escaped or attacked a prison in the U.S.

While Democrats are largely remaining silent on the issue thus far, not all Republicans are opposed to closing down the prison, with some seeming willing to work with the President on its closure — so long as they aren’t the ones that have to propose solutions. “I don’t agree with the reasons that have been offered, that they outweigh the use of Guantanamo,” Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) told the Wall Street Journal, but maintained that she would be willing to work with the administration should they propose a new detention policy. Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon — chair of the House Armed Services Committee — made a similar point in an op-ed this weekend, demanding a new detention suggestion from Obama before Gitmo can be closed.

Obama made his comments regarding Gitmo’s eventual closure at a press conference last week when asked about the ongoing hunger strike among the detainees imprisoned there. “I’ve asked my team to review everything that’s currently being done in Guantanamo, everything that we can do administratively and I’m going to reengage with Congress to try to make the case that this is not something that’s in the best interests of the American people,” Obama said at the time.

Given the intransigence of Republicans, President Obama may be forced to go around Congress to release some Gitmo detainees. Several options are available to Obama including, as CAP expert Ken Gude pointed out, utilizing his authority to transfer detainees cleared for release from Gitmo to custody in their country of origin.

A lawyer representing several prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison said on Monday that hunger striking detainees have described to him the excruciatingly painful process of being force-fed, saying that the tube going down to the stomach through the detainee’s nostril feels like “having a razor blade pulled down.”

The U.S. military says that 100 of the 166 Gitmo detainees are currently on hunger strike, although detainee lawyers say the number could be closer to 130. Their refusal to eat initially began in February as a protest against guards allegedly mishandling their Qurans but it has grown into a general demonstration against their indefinite detention.

David Remes, a lawyer representing some of those on hunger strike, described the process to the CBC’s As It Happens on Monday:

REMES: You’re strapped into a restraining chair with so many straps and hand cuffs that you can’t move a muscle. Then a tube is snaked down your throat putting it through your nostril down to your stomach and they pump Ensure into it or other nutrients and they do that until they’ve given you what they consider to be enough and then they take the tube out. … And detainees have described the experience of having the tube snaked down your throat as being like having a razor blade pulled down.

The American Medical Association, a bipartisan expert task force on Gitmo detainees and a top U.N. official have condemned the military’s force-feeding policy, saying it violates international law and could amount to torture.

Military officials say authorities force-feeds hunger strikers at Gitmo in order “to preserve life.” But Remes argues the policy is meant to prevent detainees from becoming martyrs:

REMES: The government doesn’t have the right or the authority to make that decision for the detainee. I’m sure you’re aware of the IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands who died many years ago because the British didn’t force feed him. Now they did the right thing but as a consequence, he became a martyr. The U.S. doesn’t want the detainees to become martyrs. When they say it’s lawful, what they really mean is it’s their policy. There’s no requirement that they do it. There’s no prohibition against their doing it. They just do it.

Listen to the full interview here:

Another lawyer representing two Kuwaiti detainees told NBC News on Sunday that one of his clients described a similar brutal force-feeding process:

“When that tube goes up your nose, your eyes begin to water, as it passes through the back of your skull. As it passes through your throat, you begin to gag and you begin to suck for air until it’s passed into your stomach,” [Lt. Col. Barry] Wingard said. “It’s agony, according to my client.

“The more times that you’ve been force-fed this way, the more your nose gets inflamed, the more your esophagus begins to burn, the more your stomach begins to burn.”

A new survey released on Tuesday from the polling firm YouGov found that 56 percent of Americans opposed force-feeding hunger striking Gitmo detainees, even if that means that they will die.

The Gitmo hunger strikes gained national attention after one detainee described the “painful” process of force-feeding in a New York Times op-ed last month. President Obama has since said that he will renew efforts to close the prison there.