He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means.
These men are not enemy combatants, meaning the government has no grounds to detain them, and years of failed efforts to find another home meant the only realistic possibility for timely release was in the US.
There are not, it should be said, a hundred prisoners at Guantánamo who even the United States government considers dangerous enemy combatants; that means it's a mathematical necessity that there are hunger-strikers who shouldn't be there, either.
After all, for mujahedin and professional combatants, peace means loss of valuable business.
Adherents say that M.M.A. is safer than boxing because fighters aren't allowed to get up after a knockout, and that the freer form means combatants don't endure as many blows to the head.
LONDON — When bloodshed comes to places close to conflict, there is sometimes a sense of cynical anticipation: Bombs go bang, bullets blast, often as not in theaters of war or deprivation, or both; armies fight, militants roam and the combatants provide by no means the only, or even the most numerous, casualties.
From now on we tell the truth: the Jewish state is of the opinion that the laws of war need amending in a way that reduces the risk to combatants, even if this means an increased risk to civilians.
The world my contemporaries (henceforth "we") entered as infants had quite recently slaughtered at least fifty million combatants and civilians by means of lethal industrial effort, demolishing great global swaths of mineral and agricultural wealth and human habitation and culminating in not one but two cities savagely incinerated in a matter of minutes.
But Bush declared Padilla and Marri to be "enemy combatants," which, he argued, meant that they could be transferred to military custody, for interrogation and detention without trial.
Beyond Assange and his own legal situation, there is something disturbing going on: Joe Lieberman hounding private companies (before any legal actions has been taken); the way the site was repeatedly taken down; calls by politicians and journalists to kill the leakers or have them treated as enemy combatants (what does that mean?
Mr. Graham, one of the leading Republican voices opposing the torture of terrorism suspects, emphasized that interrogation as an enemy combatant would not mean inflicting suffering on Mr. Tsarnaev in order to make him talk, and that anything he said in military detention should not be used as courtroom evidence.
