To be honest, I really don't have a preference which choice is made when it comes to figuring out how to treat terrorists. There are rules for dealing with criminals - there are also rules for dealing with prisoners of war. Both of them afford adequate protections to the prisoner.

And, hell, there are even circumstances where other categories would be justified - as long as you legislate them ahead of time and don't go changing the rules to suit momentary expediency.

I have little interest in political correctness - I see some merit in the Bob Wright suggestion that there do need to be some boundaries for the sake of civility in dialogue, but that boils down to avoiding namecalling or the perception thereof. If anything, I'm forcing myself into politically correct speach in my posting by pulling my rhetorical punches and not using the term "liars" to describe Slate's editorial staff.

I'm disappointed if you don't understand my objection here. It's not with the article text, or even really this article specifically - it's with the quality of Slate's site in general. To be blunt, I feel like Slate is frequently misrepresenting the content of articles by use of misleading, inaccurate, and/or unrelated titles and subtitles. Most of the time this clearly seems to be an attempt to"hot" up the title in order to generate clicks rather than some nefarious scheme to warp our minds... but that's almost even more appalling since it means that they don't CARE about accuracy.

I like Slate. I didn't sign up to comment before recently because Microsoft's "Passport" scheme annoyed me, but I've been reading almost daily for better than five years. It's the editorial and human-interest pages of the newspaper I don't buy. I find it somewhat frustrating and humiliating to click on a link and feel that I've been duped, and I've been getting that feeling more often recently.

Dunno. Maybe my expectations are too high, and perhaps this article isn't the best example of the problem. Or maybe I have an ongoing issue in my worklife where this sort of casual misrepresentation causes me and my company ongoing issues. But it struck a nerve and I blasted off.

-Ked