Framing the Threat

7 Obama’s Security Discourse and Policies

This chapter examines how President Barack Obama tried to discursively pave the way to end torture and close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. The following sections analyze Obama’s security narrative as communicated during 2009, his first year in office. Similar to the examination of Bush’s narrative, this chapter investigates how Obama constructed the security threat and in how far this enabled and legitimated his policies. The analysis starts by focusing on Obama’s framing of identities, that is, on the American ‘self’ (see section 7.1) and the enemy ‘other’ (see section 7.2). The aim is to demonstrate the ways in which these framings show similarities to those constructed by Bush and ...