Junk the jihad, it's jargon we need

A year before the US report, the European Community and the British were on to the same idea.

The EU's guidelines were designed to separate terrorism from Islam. Certainly a heroic mission.

Even more conscious of sensitivities than the Americans, the EU has banned not only "jihad" but "Islamic" and "fundamentalist". It was also suggested that "Islamic terrorism" be replaced with the phrase "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam". Many agreed that made them feel a lot better.

Meanwhile, we wonder the effect on terrorism and extremism of presidential words such as "evil-doers" and "worst of the worst" to describe the detainees at Guantanamo Bay, or the behaviour of the US military guards at Abu Ghraib, or the invasion of Iraq based on false intelligence, or the regime of "harsh interrogation techniques" i.e. torture, or stitching up Dr Mohamed Haneef on the strength of a whole pile of politically doctored "facts". Probably no effect whatsoever compared with getting jihad or mujihideen mixed up.

The problem that 75 per cent of the detainees the US held at Guantanamo turned out not to be terrorists does have the potential to create "misunderstandings", but with any luck the Taliban won't be too picky about it.

What is now interesting is that the really serious "evil-doers" will have to be detained indefinitely because they can never be tried as the evidence against them has been tainted by torture. The new gloss for indefinite detention without charge or trial is "terrorist incapacitation".

It is interesting that McClelland pointed to the need to recalibrate our language so that terrorism is expressed in terms of "base criminal behaviour".

This is indeed what many lawyers in the US have urged for some time. That "terrorists" be tried in the criminal courts for what essentially is criminal conduct that had nothing to do with the law of war.

Instead, an entire edifice of black hole incarceration, bogus military commissions and charges unknown to the law of war were invented to deal with an endless, bottomless "war on terror".

This particular "law of war" meant rounding up anyone, even before there was a war and even if they were outside a theatre of war, and creating the nomenclature "enemy combatant" to try to remove them from the habeas process or the Geneva Conventions.

The idea of "war" became confabulated with any political notion that needed to be foisted on to a readily fearful and gullible electorate.

The British Terrorism Act of 2000 actually defines terrorism in terms of conduct that could be applied to any war or conflict. Someone, somewhere raised the question, was Churchill a terrorist when he ordered the bombardment of German cities in breach of the second protocol of the Geneva Conventions, which was designed to prevent nations from conducting warfare on civilian populations? In terms of the current British legislation he would be.

When strategies turn to custard the thing to do is redefine the message. George Orwell, where are you?