(updated below)

When The Army Times, in September, reported that for "the first time an active [U.S. Army] unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities," those of us who raised questions and concerns about that deployment were told that this was but one little brigade -- just 4,500 combat troops -- and nothing meaningful could be done with such a deployment.  

That was never the point, of course; the issue was the precedent of allowing the President to command permanently deployed, war-trained Army brigades inside the U.S., in order -- as The Army Times put it -- "to help with civil unrest and crowd control," as well as long-standing legal prohibitions on using the military for such purposes domestically. 

Yesterday, The Washington Post reported on a much-expanded plan:  "The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011."  Like most expansions of government power, it was the Terrorist Threat that was invoked to "justify" this radical shift in policy:  

Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,dedicating 20,000 troops to domestic response -- a nearly sevenfold increase in five years -- "would have been extraordinary to the point of unbelievable," Paul McHale, assistant defense secretary for homeland defense, said in remarks last month at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

My guest today on Salon Radio to discuss this new Pentagon plan is Gene Healy, Vice President at the Cato Institute and author of the genuinely excellent book, released earlier this year, entitled:  The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power.   The Post article yesterday noted that those objecting to this domestic deployment plan include those "in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians," and quotes both the ACLU and Healy as expressing serious concerns about the dangers.  I discuss those objections with Healy, as well his relative optimism about what an Obama presidency might mean for executive power abuses.

The discussion is roughly 25 minutes and the transcript is here -- link fixed (I previously interviewed the ACLU's Jonathan Hafetz about this matter, here).

One programming note:  effective immediately, we have decided to scale back Salon Radio from three broadcasts a week to two per week, and they will now be posted every Tuesday and Friday at 2:00 p.m. EST.  The prior schedule was simply too burdensome to maintain in light of other obligations.

UPDATE:  As a reminder, and in response to several recent inquiries:  all podcasts are available as MP3's (here) and iTunes (here).  Permanent links to those pages can be found at the top right-hand corner of this page (under "Glenn Greenwald Radio").