War On Terror

In an article published in October of 2011, former The New Yorker staff writer Mark Danner published an article in which he introduced the idea of post-9/11 America as a country in a “State of Exception.” In Danner’s own words, “this state has as its defining characteristic that it transcends the borders of the strictly legal…a position at the limit between politics and law...an ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the political” (Danner, 2011). Essentially, the rule of law can temporarily be set aside in the case of emergency. As foreign as this concept may seem, he notes that this is not the first time America has lived through this—the “altered America” of the world war eras can both be defined, by
Danner’s standards, as states of exception in their own rite. However, no prior state lasted for as long as the one currently looming over America. Fifteen years after the events that occurred on September 11th, and there is still no end in sight. The precarious and perpetual state that America has found itself in contributes to a normalized world in which people’s inherent rights and freedoms can be and have been stripped supposedly “in the name of security.” Generations of Americans have grown up in this other America where Islamophobia is not a concept adopted of their own volition, but rather something that they have been and will continue to be born into for the foreseeable future. The “War on Terror,” a phrase coined by then-President George W.
Bush following the September 11th attacks, has headlined nightly news across America for more than a decade. This all-encompassing phrase that has guided militaries around the globe lacks one very important thing—direction. The “War on Terror” is an inherently ambiguous phrase, and one that lacks a clear enemy. This would lead one to assume that the aforementioned “terror” is a blanket term that includes terror cells from around the world, but this is not the case. The “terror” on which war has been waged is focused solely in the Middle East and entirely on the Muslim populations that live there. Labeling the “enemy” as a concept rather than what it truly is—a people and a way of life—dehumanizes those in the Middle East and desensitizes Americans to the harsh realities of war and the cruelties that Muslims around the world continue to endure. For years, the media has shown images of a place rife with conflict and seemingly void of civilization, as well as mug shots of Muslims “terrorists,” many of who have no connection to terror groups whatsoever. Terrorist or not, all of these people suffer similar fates in black boxes around the globe. In these locations entirely off the grid and free from American jurisdiction, human ethics are abandoned in favor or cruel and oftentimes inhumane interrogation techniques to which few would bat an
eye. The constant stream of news on Islamic “terror” abroad only legitimizes