Quick note to Anna Maria Tremonti & CBC

Just in case nobody's ever told you this:

1) "Militants" are either A) armed citizen-soldiers/rebels engaged in organized combat with the army of an established government, or B) loud and angry protesters advocating rapid and usually radical political changes. Suicide bombers are not militants. They are terrorists. Kidnappers are not militants. They are criminal thugs.

2) An "execution" is carried out by a legally constituted jurisdiction (ie, a country) after due process of law. When a gang of criminals kills captives because some demands are not met, that's not called an execution. That's called murder.

I can understand how you might be confused, because these people call *themselves* "militants" - in order to preserve the fiction that they're fighting for freedom and liberty and all that good stuff, instead of for personal profit and/or power - and because they refer to their murders as "executions" - to preserve the fiction that they represent some nebulous but legitimate authority. However, given that both of these contentions are false, I would expect a news organization to use the correct terminology - "thug" and "murder" - instead.

Glad we could clear that up.