The United States reacted to the September 11 terrorist attacks with both domestic and foreign policy actions. President George W. Bush coined the term “War on Terror” shortly after the attacks, and it has been used as an umbrella term that covers the US invasions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East. One result of the War on Terror was the creation of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, in which prisoners of war were held indefinitely without trial and tortured; as Kaur notes in See No Stranger, this practice was justified because the prison was not on US soil.

The term has fallen out of fashion as American support of the decades-long wars has dwindled, but the governmental response to 9/11 created a new framework for viewing the tragedy and Arab people more broadly:

This is […] a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient. […] I will keep my focus to make sure that not only are these brought to justice, but anybody who’s been associated will be brought to justice (Bush, George W.