Garry Wills has a good op-ed in the NYT today on the overuse of the term “commander in chief” as a sign of the militarization of our politics:

When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” That title is rarely — more like never — heard today. It is just “commander in chief,” or even “commander in chief of the United States.” This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken “for the duration.” But those impositions are removed when normal life returns.

But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and “the duration” has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever — more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.

Exactly. A case in point was revealed in yesterday’s New York Times in a piece on the extraordinary steps the Justice Department is taking to control legal proceedings with national security implications. As reported by Adam Liptak:

The Bush administration has employed extraordinary secrecy in defending the National Security Agency’s highly classified domestic surveillance program from civil lawsuits. Plaintiffs and judges’ clerks cannot see its secret filings. Judges have to make appointments to review them and are not allowed to keep copies.

Judges have even been instructed to use computers provided by the Justice Department to compose their decisions.

Instructed by whom? DOJ? The article suggests judges are only now beginning to resist these “instructions.”

But here’s the most chilling part:

In ordinary civil suits, the parties’ submissions are sent to their adversaries and are available to the public in open court files. But in several cases challenging the eavesdropping, Justice Department lawyers have been submitting legal papers not by filing them in court but by placing them in a room at the department. They have filed papers, in other words, with themselves.

Congress and the Judiciary have allowed themselves to be steamrolled by the Executive. The mid-term elections forced Congress to change. There is no such external corrective mechanism for the Judiciary, which is at it should be. So judges and justices will have to stand up to defend an independent judiciary. Will they? The record so far is mixed, at best.

TPM Reader EB writes in …

On TV last night (the WETA show Inside Washington), Charles Krauthammer repeated the claim that Joe Wilson lied about Cheney sending him to Niger. I think he said that was the important thing about the Libbey trial, that Wilson lied.

I looked up the Times Op-Ed “What I Didn’t Find in Africa”. It says “I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions” and “agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response”. It does not claim that Cheney sent Wilson.

Why does Krauthammer repeat this lie? Why did no one on the panel call him on it?

Does someone know where one can find transcripts for this show. It doesn’t surprise me that Krauthammer is still peddling this lie. But it would nice to have the proof in hand.

I was just reading over a few of the articles about the Libby trial and Vice President Cheney’s central role in orchestrating the attack on Joe Wilson in order to cover-up Cheney’s complicity in and essential authorship of one of the central lies at the core of the Bush administration’s case for war. The truth, though, is that we are not really examining the cover-up in this case so much as we are still living within it. Most of the key facts of this episode either remain entirely concealed or buried under a mass of government produced misinformation. The Senate intelligence committee report, authored by Republicans, but shamelessly and with great cowardice okayed by senate Democrats? I’ve been asked many times why the Democrats signed off on this fraudulent document. I think there are two basic reasons — or two categories of reasons.

First, as hard as it is to say, shallow and poor staff work on the Democratic side, abetted, caused and hopelessly bound up with senators unwilling to get their noses dirty or their ribs bruised. Second, there was a more specific and complex error. In so many words, the Democrats agreed to let the Republican authors of the report lie and deceive as much as they wanted on the Niger/Uranium and Wilson/Plame fronts in exchange for allowing a semi-revealing look at other instances of flawed Iraq intelligence. For the minority party to bargain for lies in some areas and portions of the truth in others is a tactic with rather inherent drawbacks. But in this case it displayed a telling obliviousness to the political context of that moment.

In this case, the senate Republicans (and the White House officials who were directing their actions) knew what they were doing; the Democrats didn’t. The Niger-Wilson-Plame saga had become a singular one in the larger debate over the administration’s use of falsified intelligence in driving the country to war. Whether it merited that singular importance on the merits is certainly subject to debate, though I believe there’s a good case that it did. But as the debate had evolved it was that singular.

It was the most damaging to the White House and particularly to Vice President Cheney whose bad acts had tracked the evolution of the story from beginning to end. Killing that story or doing it great damage was critical to the White House. Airing the details of this or that technical discussion about aerosolization of chemical agents or precision machine parts, while important in itself, would count for little in the broader public debate. Bargaining one for the other made perfect sense for the White House and senate Republicans. And the Democrats went along with it because at a basic level they were simply in over their heads. In doing this the Democrats failed twice over — first on the more substantive level of signing of on a fraudulent report and then second in not even grasping the political context or consequences of the report itself.

As long as that report remains the official word on the matter, the Democrats on the Intelligence Committee remain complicit in the web of official lies about the lead up to war.

And what about the law enforcement investigation of the Niger forgeries themselves? Here too the White House has taken effective steps to prevent any real investigation. I’ve written at length before about the joke which has been the FBI’s investigation of the Niger matter. But roughly a year ago, a colleague and I sat down with two federal law enforcement officials with detailed knowledge of the bureau’s investigation of the Niger matter. The trail, of course, led to Italy. So any progress in getting to the bottom of the matter would require the Italians to cooperate with US law enforcement to get to the bottom of what happened. Only the Italians didn’t want to cooperate. That’s not altogether surprising given that Italy’s lead intelligence agency was implicated in the fraud. But to get action, the FBI needed the US government to make clear to the Italian government that we desired their cooperation. But the Bush administration simply refused to do this. They had a tacit understanding with the Italian government to stonewall the investigation.

The catalog of official lies in this matter goes on and on.

Washington Post ombud Deborah Howell slams John Solomon in new column.

The Observer, on the status of Iran’s nuclear program and U.S./Israeli saber-rattling:

Despite Iran being presented as an urgent threat to nuclear non-proliferation and regional and world peace – in particular by an increasingly bellicose Israel and its closest ally, the US – a number of Western diplomats and technical experts close to the Iranian programme have told The Observer it is archaic, prone to breakdown and lacks the materials for industrial-scale production.

. . .

The detailed descriptions of Iran’s problems in enriching more than a few grams of uranium using high-speed centrifuges – 50kg is required for two nuclear devices – comes in stark contrast to the apocalyptic picture being painted of Iran’s imminent acquisition of a nuclear weapon with which to attack Israel. Instead, say experts, the break-up of the nuclear smuggling organisation of the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadheer Khan has massively set back an Iran heavily dependent on his network.

. . .

Yet some involved in the increasingly aggressive standoff over Iran fear tensions will reach snapping point between March and June this year, with a likely scenario being Israeli air strikes on symbolic Iranian nuclear plants.

The sense of imminent crisis has been driven by statements from Israel, not least from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has insisted that 2007 is make-or-break time over Iran’s nuclear programme.

. . .

It also emerged last week in the Israeli media that the country’s private diplomatic efforts to convince the world of the need for tough action on Iran were being co-ordinated by Meir Dagan, the head of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, Mossad.

The escalating sense of crisis is being driven by two imminent events, the ‘installation’ of 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz and the scheduled delivery of fuel from Russia for Iran’s Busheyr civil nuclear reactor, due to start up this autumn. Both are regarded as potential trigger points for an Israeli attack.

Hawkish elements of the Israeli government working in tandem with hawkish elements of the U.S. government to spread the chaos outward.

Worth watching:

Dutch authorities say an Iraqi-born Dutch citizen, suspected of plotting attacks on American forces in Iraq, has been extradited to the United States.

Wesam al-Delaema was put on a plane and flown to an undisclosed location in the US after losing his final appeal against extradition in December.

He is set to become the first suspect tried in a US court for allegedly plotting attacks on US forces in Iraq.

Update: A Dutch reader emailed to point out this passage from the BBC story: “[A] Dutch judge said there was ‘no reason to believe that the US authorities will not abide by the commitments they have given or… deprive the suspect of his fundamental rights.'” The reader asks, “Probably the Dutch judge (and minister Hirs Balin) had no time to read about recent developments in the US?”

Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE): “It’s not the American people or the U.S. Congress who are emboldening the enemy. It’s the failed policy of this president going to war without a strategy, going to war prematurely.”

See, that wasn’t so hard to say.

On This Week, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) had this to say: “I don’t believe that it’s helpful right now to show there’s disarray around the world as well as in our body at home. We really need, at this point, to get on the same page.”

To which TPM Reader DC replies: “I guess he hasn’t figured out yet that most of us are on the same page: we are done in Iraq, and the disaster there was brought to us by the failed policies of the administration.”

Joe Lieberman tells Chris Wallace he’s not sure he’ll support a Democrat for President in 2008:

WALLACE: Let’s look ahead to 2008. Are there any Democrats who appear to be running at this point that you could support for president?

LIEBERMAN: Are there any Democrats who don’t appear to be running at this point? Look, I’ve had a very political couple of years in Connecticut, and I’m stepping back for a while to concentrate on being the best senator I can be for my state and my country.

I’m also an Independent-Democrat now, and I’m going to do what most Independents and a lot of Democrats and Republicans in America do, which is to take a look at all the candidates and then in the end, regardless of party, decide who I think will be best for the future of our country.

So I’m open to supporting a Democrat, Republican or even an Independent, if there’s a strong one. Stay tuned.

. . .

WALLACE: . . . You’re saying you might vote Republican in 2008.

LIEBERMAN: I am, because we have so much on the line both in terms of the Islamist terrorists, who are an enemy as brutal as the fascists and communists we faced in the last century, and we have great challenges here at home to make our economy continue to produce good jobs, to deal with our crises in health care, education, immigration, energy.

I want to choose the person that I believe is best for the future of our country. What I’m saying is what I said last year and what I think the voters said in November. Party is important, but more important is the national interest. And that’s the basis that I will decide who to support for president.

Implied in Lieberman’s comments is that he’s new to this whole idea of putting the national interest first. I guess in elections past he just checked the name of the Democrat. Wonder what he really thought of Al Gore.

One thing that’s on the agenda for 2008: the fight for a Lieberman-proof majority in the senate. That’s certainly a big deal. Will Lieberman switch parties over the next two years? I think it’s extremely unlikely for the simple reason that at least at present the odds look better than not that the Dems will expand their majority in the senate. That would mean that if Lieberman switched parties and swung the chamber to the Republicans, he would likely go back into the minority in 2008 with a majority that would be committed as a major agenda item to screwing him in whichever way they could.

So Joe won’t switch because it’s not in his own interest to do so.

Having said this, let me be clear that I am by no means saying the Dems are assured of expanding their majority. The national political environment could be very different in two years and very bad for the Dems. But right now, largely on the basis of the number of seats both sides will be defending, the senate Dems will have the wind at their backs two years from now. And that, I believe, will keep Joe in place. Still, the man gets worse by the day, so the fight for a Lieberman-proof majority is an important one.