In comparison to the the explicit – if decidedly ill-judged – initial choice of ‘Operation Infinite Justice’ for the American engagement in Afghanistan, and its subsequent renaming as ‘Enduring Freedom’, Morrione reflects on the logic of naming at play in the domestic realm. He notes the significance of the fact that counterterrorism has fallen under the remit of the newly created ‘Department of Homeland Security’ rather than, say, something like the ‘9/11 Memorial Bureau for Consolidating Intelligence Gathering by U.S. Spy Agencies’ (link, pp. 162-3).
This is but one example of the way in which, in the wake of September 11, the logic of revenge and containment overtook the logic of memory. The counter-terrorist function was ‘the single agenda in [America’s] global policy … [t]errorism is … an omnipresent risk that so dominates American life that nothing else makes sense without reference to it.’ (link, p. 27) After all, when the threat is omnipresent, pervading every arena of life, there should be no need to explicitly reference it.
In Morrione’s analysis of ‘Homeland Security’, this implied presence can be seen in the way in which the events of 9/11 ‘made it possible to elide discussions about due process and spying or even about extant terrorist threats; [as] the banalities generated after an event of this magnitude have their own self-justifications’(ibid). In the ‘new normalcy’, containment and counter-terrorism were a means of securing the continued existence of the subject; a desirable end in itself.
