Since "9/12" Americans have been told that we must drop the criminal/law enforcement model of fighting terrorism and go, instead, to a military viewpoint. Gen. Clark, a military man whom one could expect to insist on the use of military, cogently shows why the strategy of the last six years has been wrong. As editor and publisher of an international journal on terrorism in the 1970s I, too, tried to fit the fight against terror into a military model. After months of shaving square pegs to fit in round holes and glueing the shavings of round pegs onto square ones in order to make those fit I saw the light. Gen. Clark has nailed it! The king has no clothes; terrorism is fought by police tactics and giving terrorists the ... More »

This editorial, while presenting a cogent argument, fails to discuss the reasons why the administration has chosen to classify Al Qaeda as 'enemy combatants'.

A nice pre-9/11 editorial to the effect that terrorists and terrorism is a criminal manner and we should deal with it as we would deal with any ordinary crime. The problem that the writers overlook is that such a path followed since the advent of terrorism in the early 1970s did nothing to stop terrorism. Since terrorists are in the authors' eyes are akin to pirates, they should then take heart that under President Bush we are following the path of His Majesty's Navy. Find the pirates and kill them taking no quarter. A better solution I cannot propose.

Treat someone you arrest as either a soldier (POW) or a civilian criminal. A POW can be detained for the duration of a war, can be visited by the Red Cross, must be treated according to certain protocols. A civilian, whether an accused criminal or not, is subject to other protocols. An accused criminal has rights to a fair trial with due process. There is simply no room for other categories such as the convenient "enemy combatant" - someone who can be held indefinitely on administration fiat or who is subjected to kangaroo court justice.

It's good opinion journalism because it challenges the status quo and raises questions that need to be addressed. I do not think that the "enemy combatant" status "dignifies" the acts of terrorists, however; it has been purely a functional term for the Bush administration to attempt to avoid the opprobrium of violating the Geneva Convention.

This article has offered cogent arguments for the either/or labels; but fails to come to the conclusion that that ‘enemy combatants’ designation and consequent secrecy has allowed the government to use any and all weapons at its disposal including the use of coercion to obtain what in the main is probably unreliable information. This designation has allowed the government to hang on to suspected terrorists without real cause and to punish accident prone fools as terrorists.

By Gen. Clark's rationale, all of the private contractors in Iraq are, likewise, illegal combatants.