What the Pentagon Defines as Terrorism

It's a damn good thing the Pentagon is keeping track of what those detainees released from Guantanamo get up to after they get back home.

Some of them are ungrateful, recidivist and unrepentant enough to perpetrate vicious acts of terror like this one:

What the DoD actually counted as their "return to the fight" was-- I hope you're sitting down -- the fact that one of them published op-ed in the New York Times. Here is part of his act of war column:

"I learned my respect for American institutions the hard way. When I was growing up as a Uighur in China, there were no independent courts to review the imprisonment and oppression of people who, like me, peacefully opposed the Communists. But I learned my hardest lesson from the United States: I spent four long years behind the razor wire of its prison in Cuba.

I was locked up and mistreated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during America's war in Afghanistan. Like hundreds of Guantanamo detainees, I was never a terrorist or a soldier. I was never even on a battlefield. Pakistani bounty hunters sold me and 17 other Uighurs to the United States military like animals for $5,000 a head. The Americans made a terrible mistake.

It was only the country's centuries-old commitment to allowing habeas corpus challenges that put that mistake right -- or began to. (...) Without my American lawyers and habeas corpus, my situation and that of the other Uighurs would still be a secret. I would be sitting in a metal cage today. Habeas corpus helped me to tell the world that Uighurs are not a threat to the United States or the West, but an ally. Habeas corpus cleared my name -- and most important, it let my family know that I was still alive.

Like my fellow Uighurs, I am a great admirer of the American legal and political systems. I have the utmost respect for the United States Congress. So I respectfully ask American lawmakers to protect habeas corpus and let justice prevail. Continuing to permit habeas rights to the detainees in Guantanamo will not set the guilty free. It will prove to the world that American democracy is safe and well."

Well, now we know why Smirky/Darth fought so hard to eliminate the 800-year-old principle of habeas corpus: It's a terrorism tactic.

If only King John had known.