The Big Event today is the Senate confirmation hearing for CIA director-nominee Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, a man with way too many prefixes. Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe writes that the White House is trying to separate Hayden from the NSA spy scandal in an effort to keep the Senators from dwelling on Hayden’s role at the NSA.

The Bush administration moved yesterday to separate General Michael Hayden’s nomination to be the next CIA director from discussion of the secret domestic spying programs that he designed as head of the National Security Agency, in a seeming reversal of the White House’s political strategy for today’s confirmation hearing.

In a prepared statement submitted yesterday to the Senate intelligence committee for release today, Hayden makes no mention of the NSA’s domestic surveillance programs, according to a former official who has seen the five-page unclassified document. Instead, Hayden focuses only on rebuilding the embattled Central Intelligence Agency.

And for the first time yesterday, the administration briefed every Senate and House intelligence committee member about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping efforts. The White House previously insisted that the program was too sensitive to disclose its details to the full committees, leading several senators to vow that they would use Hayden’s confirmation hearing to press for more information.

This is significant, because …

Together, the two events stood in contrast to the administration’s prior expressions of eagerness to turn Hayden’s confirmation hearing into a showdown with critics of the domestic surveillance programs Bush authorized following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Last week conventional wisdom said that Hayden was chosen as the nominee because Karl Rove wanted a public fight on the NSA. Frank Rich wrote,

This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss’s appointment in the autumn of 2004.

Something happened to make Karl change his mind. The White House doesn’t want a fight over the NSA after all.

Of the White House decision to brief the intelligence committees, a Los Angeles Times editorial says,

Easing Hayden’s confirmation, apparently, is more of an inducement to openness for the administration than are legitimate questions in Congress and among U.S. citizens about the NSA’s surveillance of Americans. Confirmation for Hayden — whose nomination is problematic for several reasons — is not necessarily the price Congress and the American people should have to pay for more transparency about the administration’s domestic surveillance program.

Also at the Los Angeles Times, Laura K. Donohue writes,

The scrutiny of the NSA is deserved, but the Senate and the American public may be missing a broader and more disturbing development. For the first time since the Civil War, the United States has been designated a military theater of operations. The Department of Defense — which includes the NSA — is focusing its vast resources on the homeland. And it is taking an unprecedented role in domestic spying.

It may be legal. But it circumvents three decades of efforts by Congress to restrict government surveillance of Americans under the guise of national security. And it represents a profound shift in the role of the military operating inside the United States. What’s at stake here is the erosion of the principle, embedded in the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, that the U.S. military not be used for domestic law enforcement.

Interesting. Will the Senators be thinking about this?

On the other hand, will they, in Frank Rich’s words, “be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they’ll fail to investigate the nominee’s record?”

It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — “Tomorrow is zero hour” for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden’s N.S.A. also failed to recognize that “some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose,” as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and “for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores.”

Senators, for once, do your job.