RismadarVoice Reporters
September 12, 2026
A quarter-century after the September 11 terrorist attacks, international security experts and legal scholars warn that the political vocabulary birthed during the post-9/11 era continues to institutionalise executive overreach and sanitise military force in modern U.S. governance.
In the years following the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Bush administration introduced a clinical, bureaucratic lexicon into mainstream political discourse.
Key terms included replacing “torture” with “enhanced interrogation,” substituting extrajudicial transfers with “extraordinary rendition,” classifying detainees as “enemy combatants,” and describing air strikes as “targeted” or “surgical.”
Scholars emphasise that the central framework of the “war on terror” fundamentally reshaped global conflict by framing military action against an abstract tactic rather than a defined sovereign state or bounded geographic area.
“Terrorism is not a state, a territory or even a specific organisation. It is a tactic,” Christopher Baker-Beall, a senior academic at Bournemouth University, told reporters. “Declaring a ‘war on terror’, therefore, created a conflict without an obvious geographical boundary or clearly defined enemy and therefore, importantly, no natural endpoint.”
Academic analyses highlight several key areas where post-9/11 terminology altered state policy and civil liberties:
Bureaucratic phrasing and internal legal frameworks such as the Bush administration’s “Torture Memos” helped shield coercive practices like waterboarding, prolonged sleep deprivation, and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay behind a veneer of administrative legality.
The passage of the Patriot Act in 2001 and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2002 shifted federal policy from reacting to active crimes toward governing hypothetical future threats, broadening state authority over immigration, domestic policing, and intelligence gathering.
Defining security through prospective threats established a precedent for military intervention without traditional intelligence verification, a mechanism observed during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Although former President Barack Obama officially declared the end of the “war on terrorism” in 2013, researchers contend that the institutional infrastructure and rhetoric remain deeply integrated into contemporary U.S. foreign and domestic policy.
Under the current administration, agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) maintain expanded operational scope, while military actions in the Middle East continue to rely on the established framework of pre-emptive deterrence and precision framing.
Leonie Jackson, a senior international relations lecturer at Northumbria University, noted that while explicit references to the post-9/11 campaign have faded, the core logic endures.
“We may have moved away from the language of the war on terror, but its effects remain deeply ingrained,” Jackson said, pointing to the ongoing reliance on pre-emptive security arguments to justify military and domestic interventions.
