Torture grew to become “enhanced interrogation”. Suspects had been seized and eliminated throughout borders by “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 struggle, 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 virtually every part that adopted: the “struggle 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 dwelling. 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 “struggle on terror” is now heard far much less steadily from the White Home. However most of the themes and concepts it helped to embed stay deeply rooted in US politics.
“I feel we are able to see the legacy of the struggle on terror in all places in US politics at the moment,” Leonie Jackson, a senior worldwide relations lecturer at Northumbria College in the UK, instructed Al Jazeera. “In truth, I’d argue that we’re nonetheless very a lot contained in the logic of this ‘struggle’.”
A ‘struggle’ with out entrance strains
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 struggle on terror begins with al-Qaeda, nevertheless 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 Navy Drive, signed by Bush on September 18. The authorisation gave the president broad authority to make use of pressure in opposition to these he decided had deliberate, authorised, dedicated or aided the September 11 assaults, or anybody who had harboured these accountable.
However in contrast to a traditional struggle, this was not a struggle in opposition to a selected 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 instructed Al Jazeera.
“Declaring a ‘struggle on terror’, due to this fact, created a battle with out an apparent geographical boundary or clearly outlined enemy and due to this fact, importantly, no pure endpoint.”
Later that yr, Bush laid down a stark problem for the worldwide group: “Both you might be with us, or you might be with the terrorists.” Bush additionally steadily used the time period “evil”.
Harmonie Toros, professor of politics and worldwide relations on the College of Studying within the UK, instructed 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 stated, it represented “a powerful discursive effort to demonise” the enemy. Worry, anger and the will to reply, Toros stated, “come collectively and create this ‘struggle on terror’”.
The end result 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 elementary 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 based mostly on repeated claims by the Bush administration that Iraqi chief Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that would threaten the US and its allies. Ultimately, the stockpiles Washington stated it was sure existed had been by no means discovered, however by that point it was too late.
The “struggle on terror” rapidly expanded right into a sprawling community of world army operations and covert operations.
Practically 780 individuals would finally cross by the US army jail at Guantanamo Bay. All however a handful have since been freed with out ever being charged with a criminal offense, however some had by then languished in detention with out prices 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 attorneys to be granted entry – he stated 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 amenities, 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 struggle.
Oiling the wheels for these practices was a language that always appeared intentionally medical. 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 odd judicial processes grew to become “extraordinary rendition”.
“What’s placing about many of those phrases is their bureaucratic or technical character,” Baker-Beall stated. The impact was to create “ethical and political distance” which “can sanitise acts of extraordinary violence and switch them into one thing that feels like an odd instrument of presidency coverage”.
In a sequence of authorized memoranda which grew to become often known as the “Torture Memos”, attorneys within the Bush administration constructed a very 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 stated 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, instructed Al Jazeera “this language additionally desensitised odd 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 regulation enforcement companies to share private data.
The post-9/11 safety structure additionally remodeled the way in which immigration, borders and home policing had been understood. The Division of Homeland Safety was established in 2002, bringing quite a few companies answerable for borders, immigration, transport and safety beneath a single nationwide safety construction.
Safety coverage grew to become more and more involved not merely with what any individual had performed, however with what they may do.
“The important thing political shift went from responding to precise threats in the direction of governing potential future threats,” Baker-Beall stated. “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 govt 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 end result as a “boomerang impact”, through which citizenship stripping, securitisation and surveillance grew to become normalised within the lives of Muslims.
The language of the struggle on terror, he stated, helped construct a wider politics of “othering”, through which total communities could possibly be solid as sources of hazard – making mere suspicion itself a justification for surveillance, detention and different types of state management, even when people had performed nothing mistaken.
What the ‘struggle 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 “struggle 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 individuals of color and assaulting protesters since Donald Trump started his second time period as US president final yr.
Removed from being shut down, Guantanamo Bay – itself maybe essentially the most recognisable bodily image of the post-9/11 suspension of odd authorized norms – has been utilized by the Trump administration to detain migrants.
The struggle on terror, due to this fact, left behind a legacy of setting up threatening communities: “a apply of villainising a selected group of individuals”, Toros stated.
“It may be gangs or a selected immigrant group, and even gender or gender id. Submit-9/11 and all of the struggle on terror discourse allowed individuals to turn into extra expert when the intent is to villainise a group.”
And its legacy expands into US international coverage, with Trump ordering the manager department in 2025 to make use of the title “Division of Struggle” 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 battle 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 army motion in opposition to Iran was essential to stop it from growing 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 elements of the post-9/11 lexicon whereas growing a vocabulary all of its personal. Navy motion has once more been framed by 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’s not merely a continuation of the ‘struggle on terror’ and the circumstances are very completely different,” Jackson stated. “However the identical pre-emptive safety logic is acquainted.”
“What’s placing is the persevering with energy of the identical political argument: We can not afford to attend for the risk to materialise, so motion needs to be taken now.”
She added that “the legacy of the struggle on terror in all places in US politics at the moment”.
“We might have moved away from the language of the struggle on terror, however its results stay deeply ingrained in US society.”
