Suspects were seized and removed across borders through “extraordinary rendition”. Detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were designated “enemy combatants”, while deadly attacks were described as “surgical” or “targeted” strikes. In the years after the September 11 attacks on New York City’s World Trade Center, a whole new vocabulary of war, laced with the language of bureaucracy and precision, moved into the political mainstream in the United States.
At its centre was a phrase broad enough to encompass almost everything that followed: the “war on terror”. That phrase came to define an era in which the US illegally invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, established the notorious Guantanamo Bay holding centre for “terrorists” and dramatically expanded its surveillance and national security powers at home. And it was all facilitated, experts say, by a new lexicon, one that sanitised violence, and erased the humanity of its targets.
Twenty-five years later, the phrase “war on terror” is now heard far less frequently from the White House. But many of the themes and ideas it helped to embed remain deeply rooted in US politics. Congress had already passed the Authorisation for Use of Military Force, signed by Bush on September 18.
The authorisation gave the president broad authority to use force against those he determined had planned, authorised, committed or aided the September 11 attacks, or anyone who had harboured those responsible. But unlike a conventional war, this was not a war against a specific group or country. It is a tactic,” Christopher Baker-Beall of Bournemouth University told Al Jazeera.
Harmonie Toros, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Reading in the UK, told Al Jazeera that this “language is used to sanitise actions taken by the US – actions that could be seen as not okay for a normal, functioning democracy to undertake”. At the same time, she said, it represented “a strong discursive effort to demonise” the enemy. Fear, anger and the desire to respond, Toros said, “come together and create this ‘war on terror’”.
The result was a narrative that divided the world not only between allies and enemies, but between notions of “good” and “evil”. In his paper, 9/11, the Crisis of Meaning, and Disinformation in the 21st Century, Jason Thomas wrote that this stems from colonial ideas of civilisation and barbarism, and the US had constructed a narrative that “asserted the … ‘civilised/barbarian’ as a fundamental axis in world politics”. The US invaded Afghanistan less than a month after the events of September 11, 2001.
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