‘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”.