‘War on terror’: How 9/11 changed the language of conflict

Torture became “enhanced interrogation”. 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.

“I think we can see the legacy of the war on terror everywhere in US politics today,” Leonie Jackson, a senior international relations lecturer at Northumbria University in the United Kingdom, told Al Jazeera. “In fact, I would argue that we are still very much inside the logic of this ‘war’.”

Nine days after the attacks on New York and Washington, DC in 2001, then-US President George W Bush addressed a joint session of Congress. “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there … It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” he declared.

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.