The judge did not rule that the fourth prisoner -- an Afghan citizen who was captured outside Afghanistan -- had a right to habeas corpus, instead ordering additional briefings on that case.
Mr. Thompson ordered the daily briefings on March 15, the day the World Health Organization declared SARS a "worldwide health threat".
The chief Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said the defense secretary grew tired of hearing "that at lower levels, there was this anxiety or that anxiety" about Guantánamo, and ordered a series of briefings to keep his cabinet-level counterparts informed about operations there.
Formerly classified files reveal Thatcher was so alarmed by the briefings that she ordered her officials to "consider what could be done to remove the danger that, by miscalculating western intentions, the Soviet Union would over-react".
But the point of the briefings has changed since Truman first ordered them.
He ordered aides to fan out in coming days with a series of speeches, briefings, telephone calls and television appearances to sway both Democrats and Republicans reluctant to get involved in yet another Middle East war.
In briefings, administration officials were told that if Syria's increasingly desperate president, Bashar al-Assad, ordered the weapons to be used, they could be airborne in less than two hours — too fast for the United States to act, in all likelihood.
The briefings aren't mandated by law; they are a tradition, started by President Harry Truman, who ordered them for Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower and Democrat Adlai Stevenson during the 1952 election.
After congressional Democrats called for additional briefings and public disclosures about an intelligence consensus that Russia made a deliberate decision to intervene in the election, Barack Obama ordered a new review of the evidence.
Despite the president's refusal (so far) to acknowledge explicitly that he gave the order to kill Awlaki, there is no doubt, whether through a signed intelligence "finding", classified executive order, or extensive briefings about the US target list, the ultimate command responsibility was Obama's.
