Framing the Threat

1 Introduction

The aim of this book is to investigate the relationship between language and security and to examine how discourse creates the scope of possibility for political action. In particular, the study scrutinizes how the language use of the U.S. presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama created political latitude. Their security discourses are analyzed in order to show how their framings of identity, i.e., of the American ‘self’ and the enemy ‘other’ facilitated a certain threat construction that shaped the presidents’ detention and interrogation policies during the ‘War on Terror’.1 By defining what was necessary in the name of national security, Bush’s discourse justified the operation of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and ...