As President of the United States at the time of the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush found himself at the helm of what was already one of the most powerful social institutions in the world, presented with an immense task and responsibility to interpret the events of the attacks and make recommendations as to how the nation would proceed in terms of a military response to the violent assaults on the nation that resulted in the crashes of four commercial airliners, the collapse of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, a gaping and collapsing hole on the Western side of the Pentagon, and the deaths of 2,996 people, including the nineteen al-Qaeda operatives that committed \"murder-suicide\" by hijacking the planes. In forging a justification to enlist global support for the War on Terror, George W. Bush wielded the social power afforded by his position as President of the United States and a coded religious rhetorical register to present its war in its speeches as \"righteous\" and \"good\" and inherently distinct from the \"evil\" and \"barbaric\" \"terrorism\" of al-Qaeda. While failing to reflect the realities of terrorism and counter-terrorism, the war nonetheless continued for nearly two decades, demonstrating that while Bush's discourses were \"not neutral reflections of social and political reality; rather, they [were] partly constitutive of that reality---they [had] a reality-making effect . . . [as] discourse and practice are interdependent or co-constitutive.\" Though Bush's public statements repeatedly emphasized the purportedly inherent difference between the violence wrought by his administration's execution of the War on Terror and the violence of the so-called \"terrorist's\" \"terrorism,\" a comparison of the consequences of these acts of violence, when Bush's War on Terrorism was finally translated from its theoretical existence in the discursive realm of the administration's public speeches into practice in the Afghan theatre of war, challenge the administration's attempts to ensure that its \"war\" and the \"terrorist's terrorism\" could not be viewed as the same.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 23847