Letters to the Editor
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'Detainees'? Prisoners.
Just another note on the verbal games the Administration has convinced us to play. Why do we call the men held at Guantanamo and elsewhere 'detainees'? It's such an antiseptic, innocent sounding word: as if they'd been pulled over at a traffic stop and asked to 'wait for a few moments while we clear this up.' And yet they've been held for years, without appeal, and have no clear route to either sentencing or freedom.
Answer: we call them 'detainees' because that's the antiseptic, innocent-sounding word the Bush Administration chose, so they wouldn't have to call them prisoners (or captives, etc.) and thus recognize their status as inmates in a US system.
I'm not buying it or using it any more, just so the US can dance its little semantic dance around public opinion and various international conventions.