US Government Petitions for Rehearing En Banc (Again) in Al Bahlul

The petition is available here. This is not a terribly surprising development. But as I wrote after the panel decision, it’s also not likely to succeed, given the composition of the original three-judge panel and the overall composition of the court. (I’ll still plan to say more about the merits of the petition later.) Instead, this is almost certainly just a play for time, forestalling, for now, the real question–whether the Obama Administration will take the jurisdiction of the Guantánamo military commissions over non-international war crimes to the Supreme Court. Stay tuned…