Six thousand words and the words “terror,” “terrorist,” or “terrorism” do not appear even once.

Yes, the issue was so thoroughly dodged that the president brought up “the attacks of September 11th, 2001″ in the … third paragraph of the speech. Is Pleszczynski’s gripe that the president called the attackers “violent extremists” instead of “terrorists”? Many of the conservative responses to the speech have been disappointingly shallow and trite.

“We have a fundamentally different view than the Bush administration did about Article 2 powers,” said Holder, referring to one source of authority the Bush administration relied on to hold detainees indefinitely. However, the president, as Commander-in-Chief does have certain power under the laws of war, said Holder, and “it has been traditional that people are held for the duration of a conflict.”

Asked if that would extend beyond a traditional battlefield to arresting a man in Peoria, Ill. and imprisoning him indefinitely — as the Bush administration did to Al-Marri — Holder said, “It’s not the position of this administration that we want to hold people for indefinite periods of time … without being tied to some statute, or international agreement, some customary in way in which this nation has conducted itself, I do not believe the president has that power. It has to be tied to something.”

Well, given that he just said that the laws of war allow indefinite detention for the duration of the conflict, and he didn’t rule out defining that conflict as a broad “war on terror” that could reach from Pakistan to Peoria, it sounds like Holder just said that he does support the executive’s power to detain anyone indefinitely  — whether overseas or at home on U.S. soil.

Notwithstanding Holder’s language about whether we’ve been at war since before 9/11, Kate tells me she hasn’t heard Holder use the phrase “war on terror” or “war on terrorism” in his hearing. Neither did Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday. And neither did Pentagon picks Bill Lynn, Robert Hale, Michele Flournoy and Jeh Johnson this morning. I admit I didn’t catch Homeland Security Secretary-nominee Janet Napolitano’s hearing today, but this is starting to sound like a trend.

If so, is it a decision coming down from President-elect Barack Obama? Or am I misinterpreting this? I have a line out to the transition to see.

Update: It looks like it’s just me. Ben Smith reported on January 9 — Panetta-rollout-day — that CIA Director-designate Leon Panetta used the term in his prepared statement. Is he the outlier? Ok, ok, I’ll stop.

WASHINGTON — Alberto Gonzales, who has kept a low profile since resigning as attorney general nearly 16 months ago, said he is writing a book to set the record straight about his controversial tenure as a senior official in the Bush administration.

It’s a miracle! Though he has not yet found a publisher, Gonzales has found a cure for the debilitating, buffoonish strain of amnesia he contracted while hard at work overseeing the politicization of the Justice Department and drafting memos to justify torture (his role in which, according to the Journal, Gonzales now downplays).

It’s called unemployment.

The Harvard Law School graduate, onetime corporate lawyer and Texas judge also hasn’t been able to land a job. He has delivered a few paid speeches, done some mediation work and plans to do some arbitration, but said law firms have been “skittish” about hiring him.

Gee, I can’t imagine why.

One has to wonder how much Gonzales can really say about his various controversies without possibly opening himself up to perjury charges after he denied having any recollection of much of his tenure as attorney general during congressional hearings. He is a lawyer, after all, so we can probably expect another boring, self-serving book.

Also worth noting: During his interview with the Journal, Gonzales took the opportunity to pity himself.

Mr. Gonzales said that “for some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.”

If so, that’s probably one casualty we can all live with.

Six men were arrested on May 7, 2007, in New Jersey, as two of them were meeting a confidential government witness “to purchase three AK-47 automatic machine guns and four semi-automatic M-16s to be used in an attack they had been planning from at least January 2006,” according to a criminal complaint.

The sixth defendant, Agron Abdullahu, pleaded guilty in October to a reduced charge of providing firearms to illegal aliens and received a sentence of 20 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

TWI’s Daphne Eviatar cited the trial in a piece last week about the U.S. government’s use of plants and paid informants in such terrorism cases. You can read it here.

As Matthew DeLong noted earlier, the Supreme Court on Friday agreed to hear Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri’s appeal, which questions whether the president really has the authority to hold U.S. residents indefinitely without charge. Al-Marri has been detained, mostly in solitary confinement, at a Navy brig in South Carolina since June 2003.

But there’s a good chance that the Supreme Court will never get to hear al-Marri’s appeal and rule on this critical constitutional question.  That’s because, as George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley explained on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” Friday, the Bush administration may decide to transfer al-Marri to a regular prison and charge him as a criminal — purely to keep the issue from reaching the Supreme Court, where the Bush administration may well lose the case.

That’s what the Bush administration did in the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen also classified as an “enemy combatant,” who was transferred to the criminal justice system so no court could rule on the legality of the administration’s actions.

The other likely scenario is that a new Obama administration, which will presumably be gung-ho about preserving civil liberties, will take over in January and reverse the government’s position in the case and decide that al-Marri cannot be held indefinitely as an enemy combatant without charges after all. The Supreme Court probably wouldn’t hear oral arguments in this case until spring, and it’s hard to imagine that the new Justice Department, under Attorney General-nominee Eric Holder — who has  made strong statements about the illegality of Bush’s detention policies — is going to defend President Bush’s executive decision to hold al-Marri indefinitely.

While that would be a good outcome for al-Marri, it could be a loss for civil libertarians, who are hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court will rule definitively that the president of the United States does not have the authority to detain a U.S. resident in a U.S. prison indefinitely without charge, without having to prove to some federal judge somewhere that he poses a real danger.

With the first debate on foreign policy set for Friday, Biden is framing his side’s security argument. Leaning into the buzz saw of terror politics, Biden says another terror attack in the U.S. will be exported from a region where “Bush/McCain” security policy failed:

Mark my words: if, God forbid, there is another major attack on America, it will not come from Iraq. It will almost certainly come from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border – where the Bush/McCain approach let down our guard and let our enemies off the hook. And unlike John McCain – who opposed Barack Obama’s call to take out the high-level terrorist targets in Pakistan and called it “bombing our ally” – we will not tolerate a terrorist sanctuary in Pakistan. If Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights. (emphasis added)

That’s sharper than the usual Democratic rhetoric, which avoids laying the blame for terror attacks, past or future. Biden also argues that Friday’s debate is already over, in a sense. The disputes over which policies best protect Americans, he says, have “already been decided.” According to prepared remarks, Biden declares: “Now, just as most Americans believe we are on the wrong track at home, so too have they come to the conclusion that we’ve been heading in the wrong direction abroad.”

It’s a confident and tougher tone from Obama/Biden heading into the first debate.