Word shift

One of the confusing halfway points of the Bush/Obama transition has been word definitions. What were words and phrases going to mean now? Were words going to mean what they've meant since linguistic dwarves forged them in their secret mountain dictionary factories or were words going to mean what the Bush Administration pretended they meant? The American populace forced to go along with these new changes, lest Dana Perino or Scott McClellan furrow their brows over this "torture" thing you were talking about, instead of the new, better phrase: coercive interrogation. Good news, we got torture back, now we've pried a second away.

The Obama administration stopped calling Guantanamo inmates "enemy combatants" on Friday and incorporated international law as its basis for holding the prisoners while it works to close the facility.

The U.S. Justice Department filed court papers outlining a further legal and linguistic shift from the anti-terrorism policies of Republican President George W. Bush, which drew worldwide condemnation as violations of human rights and international law.

They didn't give us a new phrase to use. Are they to be referred to as 'hostages', 'criminals', 'innocently imprisoned', 'some mistakes mixed in with the scum of the earth', 'our national shame', or are they to be declared legal persons at a later date?

One problem? Yeah.....he didn't really change the law, just dropped the phrase. Oh sure, they'll rely on laws passed by Congress and the Geneva conventions, not solely the authority of the President, but Obama still reserves the right to detain battlefield/'far from the battlefield' combatants. Well, at least we get to refer to the detainment as what it really is this time, which I guess was what the Obama JD thought was most important: the words, not any of the major ideas behind the words.