WASHINGTON – The House has passed a $662 billion defense bill after the White House dropped a veto threat over provisions on handling terrorist suspects.

The vote Wednesday evening was 283-136.

The White House said Friday it was standing firm on President Obama’s threat to veto a sweeping defense policy bill approved by the Senate over language dealing with the treatment and prosecution of terrorism suspects, one day after the Senate defied Mr. Obama and passed a provision giving the military first crack at detaining al Qaeda operatives.

White House spokesman Jay Carney accused the Senate of “political micromanagement” that jeopardizes national security and the work of counterterrorism professionals in fighting terrorists.

“Our position has not changed,” Mr. Carney told reporters at Friday’s briefing. “Any bill that challenges or constrains the president’s critical authorities to collect intelligence, incapacitate dangerous terrorists and protect the nation would prompt his senior advisers to recommend a veto. So we’ll see how this progresses.”

The language in question gives the U.S.

(Update: The U.S. airstrike that rained Hellfire missiles on al-Awlaki was run by the U.S. military's elite counterterrorism unit, the Joint Special Operations Command, the same unit that got bin Laden, the AP reported.

Friday's successful kill was the result of counterterrorism cooperation between Yemen and the U.S. that has dramatically increased in recent weeks, even as Yemen has plunged deeper into turmoil as protesters try to oust President Ali Abdullah Saleh, U.S. officials said.

Apparently trying to cling to power by holding his American allies closer, Saleh has opened the taps in cooperation against al-Qaida. U.S. officials said the Yemenis also have allowed the U.S.

White House National Security Adviser Tom Donilon said Sunday the volume of information seized from the terrorist al Qaeda network during last week’s mission to kill Osama bin Laden was “the size of a small college library.”

He called it “one of the great achievements in the history of intelligence,” and said it could take time for U.S. intelligence experts to analyze and act on the information found on the computer equipment taken from the Pakistan compound where American forces killed bin Laden.

“We are just starting to go through this treasure - this large cache of information - and we’ll learn as we go along,” he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press"...

President Obama's inner circle had "voiced doubts" about the plan to raid Usama bin Laden's compound, the president said in an interview, stressing that the few who knew about the mission were not at all certain bin Laden lived there.

Discussing for the first time the many risks involved in the mission, Obama stressed that the operation was a gamble up until the very end.

"At the end of the day, this was still a 55/45 situation. I mean, we could not say definitively that bin Laden was there," the president told CBS' "60 Minutes"...

WASHINGTON -- A portrait of Usama bin Laden's daily life emerged Saturday from the single largest intelligence collection ever, including a disclosure of home videos that show him watching news coverage of himself on television.

The videos were shown to the news media Saturday by intelligence officials. The five movies offer the first public glimpse at bin Laden's life behind the walls of his compound in suburban Pakistan.

The government-selected clips also provide an opportunity for the U.S. to paint bin Laden in an unflattering light to his supporters. The videos include outtakes of his propaganda films and, taken together, portray him as someone obsessed with his own image and how he is portrayed to the world...

Sources involved in the operation that took down Usama bin Laden told Fox News the terrorist leader acted "scared" and "completely confused" in his final moments, "shoving his wife" at the Navy SEAL who ultimately shot him.

The information helps clarify the conflicting details about what exactly happened toward the end of the 40-minute raid on bin Laden's northern Pakistan compound. Sources who were part of the mission said bin Laden acted in a "cowardly manner" when confronted. Fox News has also learned that while bin Laden was unarmed, he was standing near the door within reach of two weapons -- an AK-47 and a Makarov handgun that are now in U.S. custody. The handgun is a 9mm semi-automatic Russian pistol, standard issue in the Russian military until 1991.

A senior U.S. official also told Fox News that only one of the five people killed in the raid was carrying a weapon and firing.

Washington (CNSNews.com) -- President Barack Obama still opposes enhanced interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, the White House spokesman said on Tuesday, the same day that CIA Director Leon Panetta did not deny that waterboarding was a tactic that in part led to the successful operation on Sunday to kill terrorist Osama bin Laden.

On Tuesday’s NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams asked Panetta, “I'd like to ask you about the sourcing on the intel that ultimately led to this successful attack. Can you confirm that it was as a result of waterboarding that we learned what we needed to learn to go after bin Laden?”

Panetta said the U.S. intelligence community works “from a lot of sources of information,” and added, “Clearly, some of it came from detainees and the interrogation of detainees. But we also had information from other sources as well”...

Their operations are highly classified -- their names and missions rarely known to the public.

Considered the best of the best, the covert group of hand-picked warriors officially known as SEAL Team Six is called the "tip of the spear." That's why they were tasked with finding the world's most wanted man, Osama bin Laden.

Breaching his Pakistan compound under the cover of darkness Sunday, 40 men emerged after 40 minutes of fighting with the terrorist leader's body - without any American casualties...

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and other officials are expressing concern that there's too much risk and too little benefit attached to releasing a photo of Usama bin Laden's body.

Though CIA Director Leon Panetta predicted the Obama administration would "ultimately" release a photo, the pros and cons are still being weighed. And the cons are getting a full airing.

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Mich., chairman of the intelligence committee, told Fox News he uses a simple test -- if the release of the photo would make a village elder in Afghanistan less cooperative and less likely to snitch to U.S. troops about potential attacks, then he's against it...