How 9/11's 'War on Terror' Sanitized Violence Through Language

In the twenty-five years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the United States constructed a new political language—one so carefully engineered that it allowed the government to do things that would have been unthinkable in ordinary times, and to do them while maintaining the appearance of restraint and legality.

Torture became "enhanced interrogation techniques." The abduction of suspects across international borders became "extraordinary rendition." Men held indefinitely without trial at Guantanamo Bay were classified as "enemy combatants" rather than prisoners of war. Bombs that killed civilians were described as "surgical" or "targeted" strikes. This vocabulary was not accidental. It was deliberate, clinical, bureaucratic—designed to create what scholars call moral distance between the action and its reality. When you call something an "enhanced interrogation technique," it sounds like a policy instrument. When you call it torture, it sounds like what it was.

Nine days after September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush stood before Congress and declared war on an abstraction. "Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there," he said. "It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated." Congress had already passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force on September 18, giving the president sweeping authority to wage war against anyone he determined had planned, authorized, committed, or aided the attacks—or harbored those responsible. But unlike a conventional war, this one had no geographical boundaries, no clearly defined enemy, and crucially, no natural endpoint. Terrorism is a tactic, not a state. By declaring war on it, the Bush administration created a conflict that could theoretically last forever, against an enemy that could theoretically be anyone.

The language that followed served a purpose. It divided the world into the civilized and the barbaric, the good and the evil. Bush himself made this explicit: "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." The effect was to create political space for actions that would otherwise be impossible. The CIA operated secret detention facilities overseas. The US military invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in March 2003, the latter justified by claims about weapons of mass destruction that were never found. Nearly 780 people passed through Guantanamo Bay. Most were eventually released without ever being charged with a crime, but some had spent two decades in detention. Clive Stafford Smith, a British-American human rights lawyer who was among the first to gain access to the facility, saw boys as young as fourteen locked in cells. "The Guantanamo detention camp was born a sorry lie and it remains one," he wrote years later.

The torture that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and in the black sites operated by the CIA was enabled by this language. Waterboarding, prolonged sleep deprivation, stress positions—these were rebranded as "enhanced interrogation techniques" in a series of legal memoranda known as the "Torture Memos," written by lawyers in the Bush administration who constructed an extraordinarily narrow definition of what constituted torture. The effect, as scholars have noted, was to sanitize acts of extraordinary violence and turn them into something that sounded like ordinary government policy. It allowed leaders to violate international legal protections while maintaining the image of the United States as the good guys.

But the language did something else too. It desensitized the public. When death and destruction are discussed in the clinical, depersonalized terms of bureaucracy, ordinary people become numb to the reality of what is being described. When entire communities are cast as sources of danger through the logic of the war on terror, mere suspicion becomes justification for surveillance, detention, and state control. Muslim communities in the United States and Europe found themselves on the receiving end of this logic. The Department of Homeland Security was established in 2002, bringing together agencies responsible for borders, immigration, and security. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, was created as part of this apparatus. The Patriot Act, signed forty-five days after September 11, vastly expanded the surveillance powers of the federal government.

By the time Barack Obama became president in 2009, the terminology had begun to shift. In May 2013, Obama announced that the "war on terrorism" was over. But the institutions built in its wake did not disappear. Guantanamo Bay remained open. ICE continued to operate. The surveillance apparatus remained in place. When Donald Trump took office in 2025, he ordered the Department of Defense to use "Department of War" as a secondary title, signaling a return to more explicit language about American military power. The logic of pre-emptive action—the idea that the United States cannot afford to wait for a threat to materialize, so action must be taken now—has resurfaced in justifications for military strikes against Iran, echoing the claims about weapons of mass destruction that preceded the invasion of Iraq two decades earlier.

The war on terror as a phrase may have faded from the White House. But the political logic it embedded, the institutions it created, and the practices it normalized remain deeply rooted in American governance. The language changed, but the architecture it built—the surveillance state, the detention apparatus, the logic of pre-emptive security, the practice of villainizing entire communities—persists. What began as a response to a specific attack has become a permanent feature of how the United States governs itself and projects power abroad.