look , as soon as 9.11 happened, the whole administration swung into the rhetoric: the war on terror. this might seem like some sort of metaphor to me, but these folks obviously take it perfectly literally. it follows that the enemy combatants you imprison in this conflict are prisoners of war. that's *your* account, rumsfeld, not mine. and hence you have committed yourself by the most direct assertion to treat these prisoners in accordance with the geneva conventions, or to declare explicitly that the us is no longer party to these conventions. (in any case, it's clear to everyone else that we are not.) the contradiction could not be more stark: we're going to hold these prisoners until the end of the war in the conduct of which we apprehended them, but they're not prisoners of war.