Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the Obama administration has stopped using “war on terror,” breaking with the Bush administration’s terminology in describing the conflict with al Qaeda and militant Islam.

“The administration has stopped using the phrase, and I think that speaks for itself,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters as she traveled here for a United Nations-led conference on Afghanistan.

Substantive comment: perhaps we can have greater precision about what it is we’re fighting.

In 2002, Nicholas Lemann wrote an insightful piece for The New Yorker lamenting how the Bush administration linguistically committed the United States to a broader war against an amorphous foe by using the “war on terror” formulation, rather than focusing on the actually existing al-Qaeda phenomenon, which is dangerous and multifaceted enough. It was noteworthy to see President Obama define the objectives of his Af-Pak strategy around al-Qaeda — not its Taliban adjuncts, but al-Qaeda, since the United States’ interest in confronting the Taliban is a derivative of its interest in confronting al-Qaeda — and not a slipperier term.

I don’t know if the phrase Brian Beutler has reported on, “overseas contingency operation,” is going to be the replacement term, since that appears to describe discrete campaigns. But it’s probably better to simply state that the United States is at war with al-Qaeda, because it is. Not Hezbollah, not Hamas, not the Sadrist current and so forth; but al-Qaeda.

Super-substantive comment: Hey yo, John Nagl. You should take this change personally.

The Washington Post reports that a federal appeals court today blocked the release of the Uighurs — members of a small Muslim minority in Western China — into the custody of Uighur host families in the United States.

The 17 Chinese Muslims, all Uighurs, have been held at Guantanamo Bay since 2002. In October, a federal judge ordered the men released into the United States after the government presented no evidence to justify their detentions. The government no longer considers the Uighurs to be enemy combatants and has been unsuccessfully trying to find other countries to accept them for years.

TWI’s Daphne Eviatar has written about the case here and here. Basically, the U.S. government can’t find another country willing to accept the Uighurs, but it won’t return them to China for fear that they will be tortured or killed. Despite a lack of evidence against them, the Bush administration fought their release and eventually punted to its successor. Now, it’s up to the Obama administration to figure out what to do with them — and the case has created an interesting legal question: If the executive branch can’t justify a prisoner’s detention, can a federal court force the president to let the prisoner go free?

While many are worried that early signs indicate that the President Obama is toeing a suspiciously close line to the Bush administration’s war on terror policies, the Uighur case presents a clear opportunity for Obama to come down forcefully on the side of justice, rather than indefinite, unjustified detention.

The TV channels, at first soft on the Taliban, have finally come around to seeing the terror in Swat for what it is. Swatis themselves have been intimidated into keeping silent about [self-appointed Swat ruler and extremist Maulana] Fazlullah and criticising only the army and its “collateral damage”. But the channels can no longer conceal the fact that the Swatis are now praying for America’s drone attacks in their valley as the last resort.

I am in no position to judge the truth of that statement, but if it’s even in spitting distance of accurate, that’s rather significant.

On the one hand, Beitullah Massoud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and Fazlullah have taken actions that are reminiscent of those taken by the British and Russian invaders whom the Pashtun people have resisted thoughout history: through violence, they’ve sought to substitute their preferred system of governance for the organic, tribal structure that’s existed in the area for hundreds of years; and they’ve introduced new strictures on the way people practice religion.

If the United States did that, people would be screaming bloody murder, and they’d be right to. But on the other hand, you don’t want to assume that people want to be, you know, bombed. That would be an awful thing to predicate a strategy upon. Clearly more information is needed here.

Six men were arrested on May 7, 2007, in New Jersey, as two of them were meeting a confidential government witness “to purchase three AK-47 automatic machine guns and four semi-automatic M-16s to be used in an attack they had been planning from at least January 2006,” according to a criminal complaint.

The sixth defendant, Agron Abdullahu, pleaded guilty in October to a reduced charge of providing firearms to illegal aliens and received a sentence of 20 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

TWI’s Daphne Eviatar cited the trial in a piece last week about the U.S. government’s use of plants and paid informants in such terrorism cases. You can read it here.