This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 1st, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown. Words matter, and when the word is war, it's hard to overestimate how carefully it should be used.

Since President Bush's war on terror was to overestimate how carefully it should be used.

Since President Bush's war on terror was announced in 2001,

the use of a war metaphor has come with assertions of broader powers

by the president. But the U.S. may be turning a corner, so to speak,

in how terms like war are used, and so far that is mostly to the good.

So says Cato Institute Legal Policy analyst David Ritgers.

The Obama administration recently transitioned the language that they're using to describe what

we're doing overseas in Afghanistan and Iraq and Horn of Africa wherever else were deployed

to overseas contingency operations as opposed to the global war on terror.

This is a good thing because terrorists bridge

sit in some gap between being soldiers and being criminals.

What they do is criminal,

but at the same time it's done with organization that parallels a military

apparatus. So they would prefer to use the soldier paradigm to describe what they're doing

because war is a legitimate kind of conflict and so they refer to themselves in the language of

soldiers we are fighting a holy war and so it's the global war on terrorism the the gwatt that term is in

essence that is playing their mother of all battles kind of language is playing their game and it

paints them into the soldier paradigm more than is useful for what we're doing fighting them. And frankly this is actually

something that lawyers have been guilty of doing because the president's powers when he's acting in his

role as commander-in-chief he will have broader powers where Congress has not stepped

...