Security and Liberty in Post‐9/11 US Counterterrorism: A Comparative Analysis of Presidential Rhetoric
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The article examines the rhetorical dimensions of US counterterrorism policy post‐9/11 through a comparative analysis of four key speeches by Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. Using Van Gorp’s (2007) hermeneutic framing analysis, the study explores how each administration balanced (or did not) the demands of national security and civil liberties across different political and historical contexts. The findings show these US presidents employed framing devices like metaphors, examples, catchphrases, and depictions to construct a narrative of existential threat, fear, and urgency, securing public support for expansive government action. While Bush and Trump framed terrorism as an existential threat to justify aggressive measures, Obama and Biden adopted more moderate rhetoric, balancing security with civil liberties. The study identifies enduring patterns in the way framing devices are adapted across administrations and reveals how metaphors continue to be effective despite changing rhetorical strategies. These findings demonstrate the bidirectional role of framing devices: They can either drive securitisation, as evident in the rhetoric of Bush and Trump, or promote desecuritisation and a more balanced approach, as seen with Obama and Biden.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".