Torture grew to become “enhanced interrogation”. Suspects had been seized and eliminated throughout borders via “extraordinary rendition”. Detainees held at Guantanamo Bay had been designated “enemy combatants”, whereas lethal assaults had been described as “surgical” or “focused” strikes.
Within the years after the September 11 assaults on New York Metropolis’s World Commerce Heart, a complete new vocabulary of conflict, laced with the language of forms and precision, moved into the political mainstream in the USA.
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At its centre was a phrase broad sufficient to embody nearly every thing that adopted: the “conflict on terror”.
That phrase got here to outline an period through which the US illegally invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, established the infamous Guantanamo Bay holding centre for “terrorists” and dramatically expanded its surveillance and nationwide safety powers at house. And it was all facilitated, specialists say, by a brand new lexicon, one which sanitised violence, and erased the humanity of its targets.
Twenty-five years later, the phrase “conflict on terror” is now heard far much less regularly from the White Home. However lots of the themes and concepts it helped to embed stay deeply rooted in US politics.
“I believe we are able to see the legacy of the conflict on terror in every single place in US politics as we speak,” Leonie Jackson, a senior worldwide relations lecturer at Northumbria College in the UK, informed Al Jazeera. “In truth, I might argue that we’re nonetheless very a lot contained in the logic of this ‘conflict’.”
A ‘conflict’ with out entrance traces
9 days after the assaults on New York and Washington, DC in 2001, then-US President George W Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. “Our conflict on terror begins with al-Qaeda, however it doesn’t finish there … It won’t finish till each terrorist group of world attain has been discovered, stopped and defeated,” he declared.
Congress had already handed the Authorisation for Use of Army Drive, signed by Bush on September 18. The authorisation gave the president broad authority to make use of power in opposition to these he decided had deliberate, authorised, dedicated or aided the September 11 assaults, or anybody who had harboured these accountable.
However not like a standard conflict, this was not a conflict in opposition to a particular group or nation.
“Terrorism shouldn’t be a state, a territory or perhaps a particular organisation. It’s a tactic,” Christopher Baker-Beall of Bournemouth College informed Al Jazeera.
“Declaring a ‘conflict on terror’, subsequently, created a battle with out an apparent geographical boundary or clearly outlined enemy and subsequently, importantly, no pure endpoint.”
Later that 12 months, Bush laid down a stark problem for the worldwide neighborhood: “Both you’re with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” Bush additionally regularly used the time period “evil”.
Harmonie Toros, professor of politics and worldwide relations on the College of Studying within the UK, informed Al Jazeera that this “language is used to sanitise actions taken by the US – actions that could possibly be seen as not okay for a standard, functioning democracy to undertake”.
On the identical time, she mentioned, it represented “a powerful discursive effort to demonise” the enemy. Worry, anger and the need to reply, Toros mentioned, “come collectively and create this ‘conflict on terror’”.
The consequence was a story that divided the world not solely between allies and enemies, however between notions of “good” and “evil”.
In his paper, 9/11, the Disaster of Which means, and Disinformation within the twenty first Century, Jason Thomas wrote that this stems from colonial concepts of civilisation and barbarism, and the US had constructed a story that “asserted the … ‘civilised/barbarian’ as a basic axis in world politics”.
When torture grew to become ‘enhanced interrogation’
The US invaded Afghanistan lower than a month after the occasions of September 11, 2001. Then, in March 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq primarily based on repeated claims by the Bush administration that Iraqi chief Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that might threaten the US and its allies. Ultimately, the stockpiles Washington mentioned it was sure existed had been by no means discovered, however by that point it was too late.
The “conflict on terror” rapidly expanded right into a sprawling community of world navy operations and covert operations.
Almost 780 folks would ultimately move via the US navy jail at Guantanamo Bay. All however a handful have since been freed with out ever being charged with against the law, however some had by then languished in detention with out costs for two decades.
When the British-American human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith first arrived at Guantanamo to render authorized help to detainees there shortly after it opened – he was among the many first legal professionals to be granted entry – he mentioned he noticed boys as younger as 14 being held. “The Guantanamo detention camp was born a sorry lie and it stays one,” Stafford Smith wrote for Al Jazeera in 2022.
In addition to Guantanamo, the CIA operated secret detention services, or “black websites”, abroad whereas the abuse and torture of prisoners by US forces at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq grew to become one of many defining scandals of the conflict.
Oiling the wheels for these practices was a language that usually appeared intentionally scientific. Torture and abusive interrogation strategies together with the infamous apply of waterboarding, extended sleep deprivation and stress positions had been described as “enhanced interrogation strategies”. The covert switch of detainees exterior peculiar judicial processes grew to become “extraordinary rendition”.
“What’s putting about many of those phrases is their bureaucratic or technical character,” Baker-Beall mentioned. The impact was to create “ethical and political distance” which “can sanitise acts of extraordinary violence and switch them into one thing that appears like an peculiar instrument of presidency coverage”.
In a collection of authorized memoranda which grew to become generally known as the “Torture Memos”, legal professionals within the Bush administration constructed an awfully slim interpretation of what constituted torture because the CIA sought authorized authority to make use of more and more brutal and coercive interrogation strategies.
Jackson mentioned euphemistic language helped cloak such practices in “a veneer of legality”, permitting leaders to violate worldwide authorized protections, whereas sustaining the picture of the US because the “good guys”.
Tahir Abbas, professor of criminology and world justice at Aston College within the UK, informed Al Jazeera “this language additionally desensitised peculiar members of the general public, rendering them more and more numb to the deeply dehumanising and depersonalised methods through which demise and destruction had been mentioned”.
“Typically in relation to harmless victims,” he added.
Suspicion and the surveillance state
Forty-five days after September 11, Bush signed the Patriot Act, vastly increasing the surveillance equipment of the US authorities and making it simpler for intelligence and legislation enforcement companies to share private data.
The post-9/11 safety structure additionally reworked the best way immigration, borders and home policing had been understood. The Division of Homeland Safety was established in 2002, bringing quite a few companies chargeable for borders, immigration, transport and safety below a single nationwide safety construction.
Safety coverage grew to become more and more involved not merely with what anyone had executed, however with what they may do.
“The important thing political shift went from responding to precise threats in direction of governing doable future threats,” Baker-Beall mentioned. “As soon as that occurs, the potential scope of safety coverage turns into a lot wider.”
That logic created political area for intelligence gathering, detention, border controls and government energy. Governments throughout Europe additionally launched sweeping counterterrorism legal guidelines and expanded surveillance, whereas Muslim communities more and more discovered themselves on the receiving finish.
Abbas described the consequence as a “boomerang impact”, through which citizenship stripping, securitisation and surveillance grew to become normalised within the lives of Muslims.
The language of the conflict on terror, he mentioned, helped construct a wider politics of “othering”, through which total communities could possibly be forged as sources of hazard – making mere suspicion itself a justification for surveillance, detention and different types of state management, even when people had executed nothing unsuitable.
What the ‘conflict on terror’ left behind
By the point Barack Obama grew to become US president in 2009, the brand new terminology had begun to vary. On 23 Might 2013, Obama introduced that the “conflict on terrorism” was over.
However the establishments constructed within the wake of September 11 didn’t disappear with it. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, was created as a part of the Division of Homeland Safety, its enduring legacy being more and more frequent photographs of ICE brokers patrolling streets in balaclavas arresting folks of color and assaulting protesters since Donald Trump started his second time period as US president final 12 months.
Removed from being shut down, Guantanamo Bay – itself maybe essentially the most recognisable bodily image of the post-9/11 suspension of peculiar authorized norms – has been utilized by the Trump administration to detain migrants.
The conflict on terror, subsequently, left behind a legacy of establishing threatening communities: “a apply of villainising a particular group of individuals”, Toros mentioned.
“It may be gangs or a particular immigrant group, and even gender or gender id. Publish-9/11 and all of the conflict on terror discourse allowed folks to turn into extra expert when the intent is to villainise a neighborhood.”
And its legacy expands into US international coverage, with Trump ordering the chief department in 2025 to make use of the title “Division of Battle” as a secondary title for the Division of Protection, saying that the title higher conveyed America’s willingness not merely to defend itself however to struggle and win wars.
And people concepts have performed out on Trump’s watch. The US is as soon as once more at war in the Middle East, with Trump claiming that navy motion in opposition to Iran was crucial to stop it from creating a nuclear weapon – a justification that has drawn comparisons with the claims about weapons of mass destruction used within the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The Trump administration has additionally drawn on components of the post-9/11 lexicon whereas creating a vocabulary all of its personal. Army motion has once more been framed via the language of “pre-emptive” and “precision” strikes, whereas Iran has repeatedly been described as a “terror regime” and the “world’s main state sponsor of terrorism”.
“It isn’t merely a continuation of the ‘conflict on terror’ and the circumstances are very totally different,” Jackson mentioned. “However the identical pre-emptive safety logic is acquainted.”
“What’s putting is the persevering with energy of the identical political argument: We can’t afford to attend for the risk to materialise, so motion needs to be taken now.”
She added that “the legacy of the conflict on terror in every single place in US politics as we speak”.
“We might have moved away from the language of the conflict on terror, however its results stay deeply ingrained in US society.”
