Renaming ‘enemy combatants’

last updated 8 January 2015

Chalk up another win for the terrorists, said the New York Daily News in an editorial. President Obama, who has already ordered the detainment camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be closed, on Friday stopped calling the prisoners there enemy combatants, “possibly paving the way to recasting how the U.S. deals with them.” This is just another example of how the Obama and Bush administrations, aided by the courts, have made “prosecuting the blatantly guilty virtually impossible.”

“Right-wing polemicists,” said Glenn Greenwald in Salon, love to accuse Obama of “radically reversing Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies” (read former vice president Dick Cheney’s comments to CNN). But in the case of one of Bush’s most “extremist” detention theories—the power to detain “enemy combatants”—Obama is ditching the term while asserting the right to hold terrorism suspects without criminal charges. So Obama’s change is really just “cosmetic.”