Critical Discourse Analysis From The Perspective of Ecologism

Critical Discourse Studies
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Critical discourse analysis from the perspective of

ecologism
Robert de Beaugrande
To cite this article: Robert de Beaugrande (2004) Critical discourse analysis from the perspective
of ecologism, Critical Discourse Studies, 1:1, 113-145, DOI: 10.1080/17405900410001674542
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Robert de Beaugrande
CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF
ECOLOGISM
The discourse of the “new patriotism” for
the “new secrecy”
Now more than ever, critical discourse analysis is urgently called upon to deconstruct the
discourses of arrogant power and division which are largely secret for most citizens and
which baldly contradict the discourses of populist solidarity propagated in an official
democracy. This paper focuses on deconstructing two legal discourses, the craftily
named “Patriot Acts,” designed to polarize the citizenry into “patriots” supporting the
current US administration and its wars, versus “terrorists” who oppose them, and to
use “homeland security” as a cloak to legitimize a maximum of secrecy for the government
and its agents, and a minimum for the citizens.
Keywords ecologism; discursivism; patriotism, terrorism; secrecy
Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

(Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s Life of Johnson)
They that would give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety,
deserve neither liberty nor safety.
(Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania 1759)
Defining critical discourse analysis

Since the field of critical discourse analysis (hereafter CDA) might appear fairly
wide-ranging in comparison, say, to narrowly linguistic fields like phonetics and
phonology, I shall explain what it means to me and define each of its three constituent
terms to programmatically deconstruct their commonplace senses. First, I would
define “discourse” to deconstruct the borders clamped upon speech, parole,
performance, and so on by an academic general linguistics aspiring to transform
Critical Discourse Studies Vol. 1, No. 1 April 2004, pp. 113–145

ISSN 1740-5904 print/ISSN 1740-5912 online # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/17405900410001674542
114 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES
language into a scientific object by means of realist or idealist reductions and abstrac-
tions (Beaugrande, 1991, 1998a). On the contrary, discourse should subsume all
modes, means, and events of human communication and interaction. Since this
range is dauntingly vast and diverse, the selection of discourse data for critical
analysis should be expressly motivated and justified in terms of its human and
social relevance for participants, including ourselves.
I would define “analysis” to deconstruct the formalist limitations imposed upon it
within science in general, and within linguistics and philosophy in particular.
Far more than, say, chemists or geologists, or indeed phoneticists and phonologists,
analysts of discourse work with data which they always are decisively implicated
in (re)producing and determining. Each of us is challenged to balance the status of
the discourse analyst with the status of discourse participant, rather than acting
in the name of the “disinterested objectivity” of scientific observers. Discourse
data themselves are implicated in an interplay of interests, agendas, and ideologies;
multiple modes and results of analysis are always conceivable in principle. So we
analysts should seek to make our own positions explicit, and to systematize the
relation between the discourse being analyzed and the discourse of the analysis
(perhaps broadening the distinction between “language under description” and
“language of description” in Firth, 1968). Though we cannot remain ordinary
participants throughout the process of analysis, we can, indeed must, exploit what
we share with the wider discursive community as our primary means of accessing
the data as discourse – and not, say, merely as sentences of English, noun phrases,
and the other free-standing entities of mainstream linguistic analysis. The authority
of the analysts is in turn not claimed merely by virtue of our being native speakers
whose intuition and introspection are royal roads to correct theories of language;
or being holders of academic degrees in formal linguistics which unlock the deep
structure or universal essence of language concealed from ordinary speakers; but
by virtue of our systematic engagement with representative sets of authentic
discourse data, rendering our viewpoint not so much objective as intersubjective.
Finally, I would define the term “critical” to deconstruct the narrow senses of
criticism being either adverse personal commentary to position the participant as an
authority on standards of conduct, morality, or loyalty; or academic interpretative
commentary to position the participant as an authority on culture, philosophy,
literature, and the arts. Instead, criticism can be understood in a sense allied to
“critique” as one mode of dialectical thinking and communicating that programma-
tically mediates between such complementarities as theory and practice, subject
and object, self and other, inclusion and exclusion, solidarity and power, actualiza-
tion and alienation, freedom and coercion (Beaugrande, 2004). Its most forceful
critical leverage comes from the contradictions that emerge during our analysis,
reflecting in turn contradictions within the organization of modern and post-
modern societies.
Current work in CDA typically positions the critical discourse analysts as
deconstructors of the discourses of power and mystification, especially in the wake
of the “new capitalism,” with its effusive discourses of free market, privatization,
globalization and so on, which camouflage an agenda leading inexorably toward
economic and ecological disaster (Martin & Schumann, 1997; Palast, 2003; Stiglitz,
2002). The historical situation impels us to assume a critical stance and to construct
NEW PATRIOTISM 115
a counter-discourse of economic and ecological sanity, whereas a non-critical stance

implies complicity, if not indeed duplicity.
Language, discourse, and ideology

For many years, ideology was an absolute non-topic in linguistics, as indeed in most
of academic science (Beaugrande, 1998a). The popularized ideology of “scientism”
– akin to the “mystique of science” Lemke (1990) deconstructed in the discourse of
education – holds that only scientific knowledge can be true and valid, provided that
science stays free of all ideology. In fact, science has been positioned as the
diametrical opposite of ideology, viz.:
1 “The essential criteria of an ideology [are its] deviations from scientific

objectivity. . .. The problem of ideology arises where there is a discrepancy
between what is believed and what can be [established as] scientifically
correct” (Parsons, 1959; but compare the more nuanced views in Geertz,
1973; Pêcheux, 1982; Zima, 1981)
If science is grasped within the wider environments of society, as scientists are

increasingly willing to do (Gell-Mann, 1994), authority can be seen exploiting the
natural inclination of ideology to remain in the background, and thus to be attributed
only to your rivals or opponents, who are accordingly biased, misguided, distorted –
and unscientific. Such is the dominant usage of the term, as attested in the very large
British National Corpus, viz.:
2 “Every self-respecting ideology develops its own complex defence mechan-

isms which cunningly conceal, or paper over, the glaring discrepancies
and inconsistencies which inevitably arise between what ought to happen
and what actually does.” (Lewis, 1992)1
3 “This ideology of the state is coercively implemented in the policing,

arresting, trying, convicting, and imprisoning of those found to default.”
(Fulton, 1991)
Some analyses within the field of CDA suggest similar reservations:
4 “Ideology is significations generated within power relations as a dimension of

the exercise of power and struggle over power.” (Fairclough, 1992, p. 67).
5 “Ideologies are particular ways of representing and constructing society

which reproduce unequal relations of power, relations of domination and
exploitation.” (Wodak, 1996, p. 18)
6 “Ideology supports violence and is critically shaped by and in a context

of violence [and by] physical pain and social dehumanization.” (Lemke,
1995, 12f)
Probably the most comprehensive and detailed alternative view of ideology within
CDA so far has been expounded by van Dijk (his italics; compare also Mannheim’s
[1936] search for a “non-evaluative concept of ideology”):
7 “Ideologies may be succinctly defined as the basis of the social representations

shared by members of a group, [allowing] group members to organise the
multitude of social beliefs about what is the case, good or bad, right or
wrong, for them, and to act accordingly.” (van Dijk, 1998, p. 8)
I welcomed this proposal on the grounds that, like a scientific theory as described by
the philosophy of science, an ideology as can only be challenged or refuted by an
authentic alternative ideology (Beaugrande, 1998a). The deconstruction of dis-
courses sustained by a repressive ideology should be correlated with the construction
of an emancipatory ideology whose discourse restores authentic, democratic
meaning to such expropriated concepts as progress and socialism.
Perhaps CDA is de facto such an enterprise by now; but samples of its own dis-
course like 4 –6 above suggest that its self-awareness of its ideology is unsettled.
Meanwhile, the sponsors of the ideologies we deconstruct command the easy
tactic of accusing us of ideological bias and distortion, though so far such attacks
have only occasionally appeared in accredited public sources, and without much
cogency (Widdowson, 1995, 2000; ripostes in Beaugrande, 2001; Fairclough,
1996). More likely, we are being circumvented and isolated through behind-
the-scenes politicking, as when several major publishing houses dropped their book
series concerning CDA and related work, even by unilateral termination of contracts
with editors and authors (myself included), which are deemed not sufficiently
profitable. To be sure, the agents of corporate greed might not want to publish
books that deconstruct the discourse of corporate greed. But that principle is
manifestly changing as the corrosive impact of corporate greed is visibly dragging
down even wealthy societies (Begala, 2003; Hightower, 1997, 2003; Moore, 1997).
For my part, I have proposed the term “discursivism” for a critical method of
discursive and ideological engagement between our discourse and the discourse to
be described or analyzed (Beaugrande, 2004). This method entails reshaping the
role of the academic and scientific author to focus on sharing knowledge with
those who need it rather than merely a community of experts, and to deconstruct
the academic decorum of impersonal authorship, which is favoured especially
among colleagues, journal editors, or peer reviewers and which does not accom-
modate the needs of a general audience. In particular, we can seek out discourse
data from less obvious or accessible sources that help to deconstruct those themes
of public discourse that only feign a concern for democracy, and can thus offset
the determination of the government and the obedient mass media to tell only
half of the story – the phoney half, as I shall demonstrate further on.
Introducing ecologism: let’s start from democracy
In theory, democracy is a state ideology clearly aimed at universal inclusion and

equality of every citizen. In practice, however, few ideologies are so vigorously
NEW PATRIOTISM 117
contested, bent, or falsified around the world today. Nearly every government
purports to belong, and some officially sport the suspiciously redundant label of
“Democratic Republic,”2 such as Algeria, Azerbaijan, Ethiopia, the Congo, and,
yes, North Korea. At such a stage, restoring the term to its essential meaning
takes on an ineluctable urgency.
The ideological imperative should be to establish a genuine dialectic between
theory and practice of democracy by actually living by the principles we profess.
Admittedly, a total convergence between the theory and the practice would be
state of utopia we can never attain. Yet for that very reason, we will always have
space to improve the fit.
The agenda for promoting a dialectical convergence between inclusive theories
and inclusive practices in pursuit of democracy is the centrepiece of the ideology I
have called “ecologism” (Beaugrande, 2004). The term itself is best known in
relation to environmentalism and the green movement (Jagtenberg & McKie,
1997; Porritt, 1989), with its firm emphasis on biology, climatology, and conserva-
tion (Leggett, 1990, 2001; Myers et al., 1993). But in recent years, the scope has
expanded toward fundamentally reconceptualizing economic, political, and cultural
institutions (Baxter, 2000; Bednar, 2003; Smith, 1998), including freedom
(Bookchin, 1991) and democracy (Morrison, 1995). Ecologism cannot be just a
roadmap for being kinder to the environment by recycling waste, building more
fuel-efficient cars, or harnessing solar and wind power – though these modest initia-
tives would go far to improve today’s world steered by oil companies and nuclear
energy – which only postpones the impending ecological disasters. Instead,
ecologism must seek a comprehensive redefinition of relations of the human race
to the entire biosphere, and of the responsibilities we must finally assume if we
intend to survive decently into a twenty second century worth living in.
As a key resource, ecologism can deploy strategies for discursive theory and
practice to promote freedom of access to knowledge and society (Beaugrande,
1997). One initial step might be to clear away the ideological baggage from our
thematic terms lest our discourse be drawn into the mode of mystifications we are
resolved to deconstruct. To start off, we can define ideology itself etymologically
as the framework for the production, representation, and dissemination of ideas
(van Dijk, 1998, quoted in 7 above). The definition fits some offered by major
dictionaries, such as “a systematic body of concepts especially about human life or
culture” (Webster’s Seventh, p. 413); or “a body of doctrine or thought that guides
an individual, social movement, institution, or group” (Random House Webster’s,
p. 668).
We can define social progress as any move bringing inclusive practice closer to
inclusive theory, versus social regress as any move bringing exclusive practice further
from inclusive theory. Much of what public discourse presents as progress is actually
regress by these criteria, such as the “economic growth” which benefits the few by
imposing economic shrinkage upon the many. An authentic example of progress
would be the founding of community development credit unions providing low-
interest loans to low-income clientele who would not qualify with mainstream
banks (Rosenthal, 2001).
Next we can define a straightforward distinction between progressive and regres-
sive ideology. On the progressive side we can situate left-wing ideology holding that
human rights are inclusive and equal in theory, and that social and political practice
should pursue a broad conception of public good. On the regressive side we can
situate right-wing ideology holding that human rights are exclusive and unequal in
both theory and practice in exact proportion one’s wealth and power, and that
social and political practice should pursue a narrow conception of private good.
Here we need to clear away the exceptionally ponderous baggage of past misapplica-
tions. What was passed off as left-wing socialism or communism in societies like
Eastern Europe was, due to that same material determinism the “Marxist” leadership
grotesquely forgot, only left-wing in theory but right-wing in practice. Those
regimes collapsed not because they had embraced real socialism – a notion the
Western media never tire of repeating like a mantra – but because the leadership
had replaced it with a spurious socialism with a flagrantly right-wing underside,
by squandering state resources on a surreptitious, opulent private economy (lifestyle)
for the leaders, and on costly security forces, surveillance technologies, and sealed
borders for the deprived citizenry.
To restore the essential meaning of contrasting ideologies, we can define
socialism as a society-based ideology whereby the state assumes responsibility for
the collective welfare and security of the citizenry. The primary function of
nationalized enterprises is thus not to generate profits, but to guarantee stable
employment. Conversely, we can define capitalism as a capital-based ideology in
which the welfare and security of a citizenry is delegated to competition among
private agents and interests that are protected and subsidized by state power. An
opulent lifestyle for the leaders by no means contradicts the ideology but rather
confirms it, even if is supported by devious financial manoeuvres (Mokhiber &
Weissman, 1999; Nader, 2002; Palast, 2003).
The overall history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reflects the
striving of capitalism first to repress socialism, then to co-opt it, and now to
repress it again. Apostles of this new capitalism preach morality with a wondrously
straight face, viz.:
8 “Capitalism is the only moral social system because it is the only system that
respects the freedom of the producers to think and the right of the individual
to set his own goals and pursue his own happiness. . .. It is the only system
that safeguards the freedom of the independent mind. . .. All decisions are
to be left to the ‘free market’ – that is, to the un-coerced decisions of
buyers and sellers, manufacturers and distributors, employers and employ-
ees.” (Tracinski)
This is the phoney half of the story; the real half is that right-wing media are striving
vigorously to abridge the freedom to think and exercise an independent mind (Alter-
man, 2003; Conason, 2003; Franken, 2003); and when the real ideology of the free-
market is less free than ever, whilst monopoly and “welfare to corporations are at
an all time high, and government collusion with the corporations has never
been more thorough” (Phil Graham, private communication; cf. Begala, 2003;
Moore, 2001). Freedom is actually reserved for corporations to proceed without
government regulation and drive stock prices up by means of massive layoffs, which
carry such doublespeak designations as “release of resources” (Bank of America),
NEW PATRIOTISM 119
“decruiting” (Council of Residential Specialists), a “career transition program”

(General Motors), a “normal payroll adjustment” (Wal-Mart), and “management
initiated attrition” (IBM). I am indebted here to Hightower (1997, p. 78)
We must utterly deconstruct the simplistic equation whereby liberal (or
Democrat) is left-wing and conservative (or Republican) is right-wing. From the
1990s onward, both ideologies and political parties are characteristically sponsored
by the same right-wing market forces, whose control is ensured no matter which side
wins the elections (Nader, 2002). We need to critically probe who or what is to be
“liberated” or “conserved,” for example when both sides are voting for staggering
tax relief that will bankrupt the federal government and its social programs (should
any remain) in the clearly foreseeable future, though perhaps not in the lifetimes
of the major tax-cutters of today (Krugman, 2003).
Besides, the official discursive strategies on both sides seek to sound inclusive,
sincerely concerned for ordinary citizens, farmers, children, minorities and so on.
Special care should therefore be devoted to comparing discourses affirming inclusion,
such as those that emanate continually from President George W. Bush and his
administration, with counter-discourse unmasking practices of exclusion, viz.:
9 “By far the vast majority of my tax cuts go to those at the bottom” (debate with
John McCain) (The bottom 60% got just 14.7% – Citizens for Tax Justice)
10 “Our first goal is clear: We must have an economy that grows fast enough
to employ every man and woman who seeks a job.” (State of the Union
address, 2003) (By November 2003, three million jobs had been lost under
Bush’s policies – “the worst overall job growth rate under any president
in 58 years”: AFL-CIO, 2003)
11 “I have sent you Clear Skies legislation that mandates a 70 percent cut in air
pollution from power plants over the next 15 years.” (State of the Union
address, 2003) (“It is a challenge to imagine a more aggressive assault
on our clean air protections or a more blatant disregard for the health of
our citizens and our environment”: Senator Charles E. Schumer on Bush’s
“New Source Review”)
12 “I believe the results of focusing our attention and energy on teaching

children to read.” (He cut $39 million from federal spending on libraries,
and proposed eliminating the “Reading is Fundamental” programme,
which has distributed 200 million free books to low-income children since
1966: Michael Moore, 2001)
Such contrasts suggest that doublespeak can also be literally interpreted as a dualism
between the phoney story told to the general public on TV shows and press confer-
ences, versus the real story which you have to dig out from sources the public hardly
sees – certainly not featured in prime time TV.
If so, prevarication, concealment and secrecy are absolutely essential to ideological
control (Conason, 2003; Corn, 2003). Right-wing discourse needs to legitimize not
merely its anti-social policies but its resolute secrecy about their actual contents and
purposes. Witness President Bush’s own legitimizing discourse:
13 Q: “Congress has said members of both parties have told us they’re not
getting enough information from the White House.”
The president: “I’m not going to let Congress erode the power of the Execu-
tive Branch. I have a duty to protect the Executive Branch from legislative
encroachment. . .. When the GAO [General Accounting Office, which
sued the White House for Enron records] demands documents from us,
we’re not going to give them to them. These were privileged
conversations. Can you imagine having to give up every single transcript of
what is advised me [sic] or the Vice President? Our advice wouldn’t be
good and honest and open.” (Press Conference, March 13, 2002)
14 Q: “Why has the White House said that Governor Ridge [Secretary of
Homeland Security] will not testify?”
The president: “Well, he’s not – he doesn’t have to testify; he’s a part of my
staff, and that’s part of the prerogative of the Executive Branch of govern-
ment. And we hold that very dear.” (Press Conference, March 13, 2002)
15 “I’m the commander, I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the
interesting thing about being President. . .. I don’t feel I owe anyone an expla-
nation.” (addressing the National Security Council, November 20, 2002)
We can recognize four distinct phoney stories about secrecy here. First, the balance of
power must be protected between the executive and legislative against the latter’s
“erosion” and “encroachment” in requesting information (in this case about
Enron). Second, consultants give advice that is “good and honest and open” only
under secrecy. Third, the “prerogative of the Executive Branch of government” auth-
orizes not having to testify. Fourth, US presidents just don’t “owe anyone an
explanation,” full stop. The last three deconstruct the first, betraying the real stories
that the executive is eroding legislative power, not vice-versa; and that the advice
is bad, dishonest, and clandestine (Ivins & Dubose, 2003; Palast, 2003). Amalgamating
all four arguments, the story could be that the entire Executive Branch doesn’t owe
information to anyone, including Congress or the General Accounting Office – or
the American people. And this story is being written in law, as we shall see.
Just how expedient this secrecy can be emerged during the Enron scandal, from
an astounding justification offered by White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer for
Vice-President Cheney’s refusal to release the records of secret meetings of the
Energy Task Force with corporations like Enron:
16 “The very document that protects our liberties more than anything else,
the Constitution, was of course drafted in total secrecy.”
Here, a specious equation is proffered between a presumed record of corporate and

governmental cronyism versus the fundamental document of American democracy,
whose records and minutes were fully published as soon as the work was finished.
NEW PATRIOTISM 121
Only when a memo from Enron Chairman Ken Lay to Vice President Cheney
appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and from there in the Fact Sheet of the
Committee on Government Reform, U.S. House of Representatives (January 31,
2002), did we get both halves of the story, viz.:
17 “What was put in the energy plan was put in at the need to help address an
energy shortage in America, not as the result of a request of any one
company or any one person. It was done because it’s the right policy for
the country.” (Fleischer)
18 “Contrary to the White House claim, the White House energy plan incor-
porates the vast majority of Mr. Lay’s policy recommendations, [such as] to
exercise federal eminent domain authority to override state decisions on
siting of transmission lines, to reject price controls on electricity as a
way to mitigate the California energy crisis, and to speed permitting of
new energy facilities.” (Committee on Government Reform Fact Sheet,
2002)
The cosy relations between the administration and various large corporations
whose aggressive accounting ended in disaster and wiped out the life savings for
countless Americans (though not for the responsible CEOs) add to the urgency for
government secrecy, which, as will be shown later on, was imposed under the
label of “patriotism.”
Taking office for the “New American Century”
The train of events leading up to this momentous imposition can be traced back at
least to the spring of 1997, when a wealthy right-wing think-tank styling itself
“Project for a New American Century” (PNAC) was founded “to make the case
and rally support for American global leadership.” Far from proceding secretly, it
used the Internet3 to promulgate a mission statement and later a 90-page report
on Rebuilding America’s Defenses, which is nothing less than “a blueprint for US
world domination” drawn up by “chicken-hawks – men who have never seen the
horror of war but are in love with the idea of war” (to quote Tam Dalyell,
longest-serving member of the British Parliament).4 Here are some of the missions
in the original discourse:
. establish a global security order that is uniquely friendly to American interests;
. provide a secure basis for US power projection around the world;
. discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even
aspiring to a larger regional or global role;
. create a new military service – US Space Forces – with the mission of space
control;
. take total control of cyberspace to prevent enemies using the Internet against
the US;
. fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars.
Such plans might sound like the story for some futuristic Hollywood fantasy, where
somebody is always out to rule the world. But from today’s viewpoint, the plans have
assumed a grim realism now that the group of signers reads like a Who’s Who of the
two Bush administrations and their associates: Elliott Abrams, William J. Bennett,
Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Eliot A. Cohen, Francis Fukuyama, I. Lewis Libby,
Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz – it is as if
the think-tank had been virtually absorbed into the administration of Bush Jr.
Patriotism and secrecy

If it seems callous to call the 9/11 attacks a “golden opportunity” (see 19) for an
“illegitimate” presidency (Moore, 2003), the administration’s “exploitations”
have been callous enough, though the press had to overcome its initial “shyness”
in pointing this out (see 20 below).
19 “The events of Sept. 11 shocked and horrified the nation; they also
presented the Bush administration with a golden opportunity to bury its
previous misdeeds.”(Krugman, 2002)
20 “The press has become a lot less shy about pointing out the administration’s
exploitation of 9/11, partly because that exploitation has become so
crushingly obvious. As the Washington Post pointed out, in the past six
weeks President Bush has invoked 9/11 not just to defend Iraq policy and
argue for oil drilling in the Arctic, but in response to questions about
tax cuts, unemployment, budget deficits, and even campaign finance.”
(Krugman, 2003b)
At all events, the administration gladly seized the opportunity to force radically
right-wing legislation upon Congress which maximizes secrecy for the government
and its agents whilst minimizing it for the citizens, and which makes it a crime to
breach the secrecy about the radical contradiction in this skewed and deceptive
mode of operations. In effect, the government arrogated to itself sweeping powers
of secret surveillance and control, and stipulated that citizens or residents who
were “unpatriotic” enough to resist, refuse, or speak out can be fined, imprisoned,
or deported (or all of these).
The outcome was the USA Patriot Act of 342 pages, whose title is a devious and
contrived acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools
Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (HR 3162 RDS, 107th Congress).5 The
discourse actually says nothing at all about patriots and refers to patriotism exactly
once, namely when
21 “The Nation is called upon to recognize the patriotism of fellow citizens

from all ethnic, racial, and religious backgrounds.” (Section 102)6
presumptively including those Black and Hispanic Americans who were illegally
stripped of their voting rights in Florida (Palast, 2002). The Act was triumphantly
NEW PATRIOTISM 123
signed into law by President Bush on October 26, 2001 – just 45 days following the
attacks – after being rammed through Congress under unprecedented conditions:
22 “The act was hurriedly signed into law with overwhelming approval within six
weeks of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington – without hear-
ings or without being marked up by a congressional committee.” (Straub)
23 “Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) told the Washington Times that no

member of Congress was allowed to read the first Patriot Act . . . before
its passage, and no debate was tolerated by the House and Senate
leadership. . .. Dick Cheney . . . publicly threatened members of Congress
that if they didn’t vote in favor of it they would be blamed for the next
terrorist attack. [Even the far-right former Nixon advocate] William
Safire described the first Patriot Act’s powers by saying that President
Bush was ‘seizing dictatorial control.’” (Alex Jones in Infowars)7
Fittingly enough, the passage itself occurred under maximal secrecy, a harbinger of
the circumstances it sought to establish. Just 12 days before passage (October 12
2001), Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a Memorandum for Heads of All Federal
Departments and Agencies encouraging them to stonewall requests for information:
24 “When you carefully consider FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests

and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that
the Department of Justice will defend your decisions.”
However, some authentic patriots posted the secretive text of the Patriot Act law on
the Internet, where it has been analyzed by citizens’ advocacy groups like the Amer-
ican Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).8
Not content with their radical Patriot Act (hereafter Patriot I), the Department
of Justice (hereafter DoJ) drew up the even more radical Patriot Act II with 120
pages, whose official title is the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, dated January 9,
2003 and secretly forwarded “for comment” on January 10 to Speaker of the
House Dennis Hastert and Vice-President Cheney,9 but publicly posted by the
Center for Public Integrity (CPI) on the Internet on February 7.10 Though
stamped for secrecy with “Confidential – not for distribution” at the top of every
page, it opens with a revealing section-by-section analysis evidently intended as a
public or at least congressional advocacy of why previous legislation – including
Patriot I – needs to be amended.
I downloaded both discourses for purposes of study analysis, and also installed
them as a library in a concordance program called WordPilot, which enables me to
process them as a mini-corpus and search for significant frequencies and collocations.11
Admittedly, analyzing two strenuous legal discourses of 56,869 words (Patriot I) and
36,664 words (Patriot II) is a daunting challenge under any circumstances, but these
two discourses were especially designed to treat secrecy in secretive language, just
in case anyone inside or outside Congress should essay to read them. In what
follows, I isolate and illustrate some major discursive strategies for imposing and
justifying secrecy, such as a critical analysis might reasonably address.
Using the term “terrorism” continually or in expansive senses and

contexts
One strategy, much beloved of the far right, is simple repetition. If, as we, saw,
Patriot I says virtually nothing about patriots and patriotism, it makes continual
use of “terrorism” and “terrorist,” plus various derivatives like “bioterrorism,”
showing a total of 336 occurrences.12 In Patriot II, where “patriot” or any derivative
occurs exactly zero times (except in the name of the predecessor act), “terrorist/
terrorism” occurs 353 times, almost twice the density (at 0.096%) in the much
longer Patriot I (at 0.059 %). Typically, the term clusters within Patriot II in con-
texts of “threatening” or “endangering” “security” (79 uses, not counting in the
name of any Act). But mere repetition of the term helps convey the message that
the threat is real and omnipresent.
The significance of the term is strategically expanded by association with activi-
ties not ordinarily relating to terrorism. An essentially new and broad definition in
Patriot I provides the centrepiece:
25 “The term ‘domestic terrorism’ means activities that (A) involve acts
dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the
United States or of any State; (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate
or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government
by intimidation or coercion.” (I: 802)
In a literal reading, the first clause (A) would reclassify as terrorism every violation of
law that endangers human life, which could include drunken or reckless driving,
unknowingly selling meat contaminated with salmonella, or just failing to post
enough “danger” signs at construction site excavations. By the second and third
clauses (B and C), you can qualify as a terrorist without doing anything at all, or
even intending to; you need merely “appear to intend” to do it. Thus, overt acts
become terrorism through a secret process of the law enforcement agencies or their
informants who judge appearances. For some columnists who display their opinions
in public discourse, just looking (or being) “Mideastern” is suspicious enough:
26 “On the sidewalk [at Times Square], we saw two ‘Mideastern [sic] looking
men,’ [who] looked like the guys who’d just a few days before blown up a
landmark . . . silently videotaping the outside of St. Pat’s [St. Patrick’s
Cathedral, a famous landmark] . . . I surveyed the street for a policeman
or patrol car [and] thought: ‘Those guys are terrorists.’” (Noonan, 2001)
27 “The only answer is ethnic profiling. Every Middle-eastern-looking truck

driver should be pulled over and questioned.” (Charen, 2001)
28 “Hundreds of Iranian and other Middle East citizens were in southern

California jails on Wednesday after coming forward to comply with a
new rule to register with immigration authorities only to wind up
handcuffed and behind bars . . . under a new nationwide anti-terrorism
program.” (Reuters, December 19, 2002)
NEW PATRIOTISM 125
Expansive too is having terrorism cover “intimidating civilians” (unless the

government does it), which could include warning them about dangerous chemical
companies, which Patriot II restricts one from doing, as we’ll see below in 55.
“Influencing the policy of a government” could include filing a lawsuit for release
of White House documents relating to its close involvement with Enron, as noted
above in 13 and 18.
Elsewhere, the term “terrorist” occurs in contexts where it doubles with
“consumer”:
29 “To avoid alerting terrorists that they are under investigation, this pro-
vision would prohibit (absent court approval) disclosing to a consumer
the fact that law enforcement has sought his credit report.” (II: 126)
Yet even these loose discourses hardly cover acts to which the DoJ is vigorously
applying the label of terrorism, where no life is endangered, and no population or
government is being intimidated or coerced, viz:
30 “In the first two months of this year, the Justice Department filed ‘terrorism’
charges against 56 people. But an investigation has found that at least 41
of them had nothing to do with terrorism – a point that prosecutors
acknowledge. . .. In January, the General Accounting Office reported that
three-fourths of all ‘international terrorism’ convictions were wrong in
fiscal 2002. . .. The largest group of ‘terrorism’ cases this year was from
Texas, where prosecutors have won guilty pleas from 20 of 28 Latinos
charged with illegally working at the Austin airport.” (Fazlollah)
31 “The Justice Department has used many of the anti-terrorism powers granted
in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks to pursue defendants for crimes
unrelated to terrorism, including drug violations, credit card fraud, and bank
theft, according to a government accounting released yesterday.” (Eggen,
2003)
I was wryly amused by the DoJ’s recently opened website launched to “educate
Americans about how we are preserving life and liberty by using the USA Patriot
Act,” where drug crimes, mail fraud, and passport fraud are correctly termed
ordinary, non-terrorism crimes (http://www.lifeandliberty.gov).
Deploying the extraordinary category of “enemy combatant”

Patriot II briefly speculated on the “extreme benefits” of “clarifying how DNA
samples” from “unlawful combatants at Guantanamo Bay” can serve “counterterrorism
and law-enforcement purposes” (Section 302), though the DoJ mercifully did not (yet)
assert that terrorism is determined by a person’s genetic code. Otherwise, combatants
do not appear in the two Patriot Acts. But these did furnish the basis for introducing an
extraordinary category of people who simply possess no legal and constitutional rights:
32 “The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which

terrorism suspects – U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike – may be
investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protec-
tions guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the
government say.” (Lane, 2002)
Once again, the DoJ emitted a phoney story cloaked in doublespeak:
33 “Saying the United States is at war, Attorney General John Ashcroft Tuesday
adamantly defended the administration’s policy to detain enemy combatants
without giving them the right to speak to an attorney. ‘Some people fail to
understand that security is designed to secure something, and what we are
securing are the rights of individuals’, Ashcroft told CNN’s Larry King
Live. ‘So, rather than security being something that challenges rights and
that diminishes rights, security makes those rights safe and strong.’” (“Ash-
croft: US ‘securing freedom’”, 2002)
The bizarre story that denying the right to speak to an attorney does not challenge or
diminish the rights of individuals can be understood only if we create a separate
meaning for the “rights” of American citizens not to be victims of combatants:
34 “There are no civil liberties that are more important than the right to be
uninjured and to be able to live in freedom.” (Ashcroft, quoted in
Lacaye, 2003)
The same story says that just granting a “detainee” constitutional rights such as an
attorney and a speedy public trial will somehow cause innocent citizens to be
injured and to lose their freedom – never mind the verdict.
The other (and uglier) side of this curious story is how the “right to be unin-
jured” is one more denied to Muslim detainees, such as those in Guantanamo, viz.:
35 “Upon leaving their cells, they have been subjected to strip searches and body
cavity searches, and they have been placed in ‘three-piece suits’ consisting of
leg restraints and a belly chain linked to handcuffs.” (Amnesty International)
36 “His face was slammed into a wall and he was kicked by prison guards. His
lower teeth were loosened in the process, and although he was in extreme
pain, he was not allowed to see a dentist.”(Turkmen vs. Ashcroft)
37 “He was grabbed by the hair while he was shackled and forced to face an
American flag by a prison guard who told him ‘This is America.’”
(Amnesty International)
The dire threat of being declared enemy combatants suffices to extort guilty pleas
without evidence being offered:
NEW PATRIOTISM 127
38 “The federal government implicitly threatened to toss the defendants into a

secret military prison without trial, where they could languish indefinitely
without access to courts or lawyers. That prospect terrified the men.
They accepted prison terms of 61/2 to 9 years. ‘We had to worry about
the defendants being whisked out of the courtroom and declared enemy com-
batants if the case started going well for us,’ said attorney Patrick J. Brown,
[even though] prosecutors never offered evidence that the defendants
intended to commit an act of terrorism. . .. ‘One by one,’ Bush said after
the arrests, ‘we’re hunting the killers down.’” (Powell, 2003)
President Bush has been granted by a court decision in January 2002 “the authority to
designate US citizens as enemy combatants and detain them in military custody if they
are deemed a threat to national security” (“Americans may be held”). And he
doesn’t owe anybody an explanation:
39 “Solicitor General Ted Olsen argued, in a recent legal brief, there is no

requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining
who qualifies as an enemy combatant and no set evidentiary standard the
administration needs to meet in order to slap someone in prison, incom-
municado, without right of appeal or habeas corpus.” (“Beria lives”)
Ted Olsen allegedly once “wrote articles anonymously in the American

Spectator . . . charging the Clintons with a multitude of felonies, including a list of,
in his opinion, the years in jail that they ought to have served” (“Buzzflash interviews
David Brock”). Surely he’d love to have the presidential pair locked up as enemy
combatants. (Hmmm. . .)
Making dense, often fragmented references to other statutes

Much of both Patriot Acts consists of making minor changes to the wording (or just
punctuation) of 15 previous statutes which are not quoted, though most can be down-
loaded from the Internet (see endnotes for the latest sites). They are cited under
these names: Atomic Energy Act of 1954; Bank Holding Company Act of 1956;13
Communications Act of 1934;14 Controlled Substances Act;15 Crime Identification
Technology Act of 1998;16 Fair Credit Reporting Act;17 Federal Deposit Insurance
Act;18 Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure; Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act;
Immigration and Nationality Act;19 International Emergency Powers Act; National
Security Act of 1947; Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978;20 State Department
Basic Authorities Act of 1956; Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse
Prevention;21 and the United States Code.22
Moreover, Patriot II proposes 22 changes to Patriot I, such as inserting the ominous
section heading “Required disclosure of customer communications or records” (2703).
Several potent reasons might encourage this strategy of making minor and brief
amendments. First, the DoJ is eager to present the image of making “only modest,
incremental changes in the law” (Department of Justice website), so that the Act
appears to be authentically woven into a seamless texture of established US legis-
lation:
40 “Congress simply took existing legal principles and retrofitted them to

preserve the lives and liberty of the American people from the challenges
posed by a global terrorist network.” (DoJ website)
Second, heeding the numerous calls to repeal Patriot I would require hunting down
and reversing all the changes, which have already been made, at least in the United
States Code as it is now posted by the House of Representatives. Third, the Act
written this way simply could not be digested by members of Congress at the break-
neck speed at which it got rammed through, as attested above in 23 and 24, even if
they had a chance to read it and had taken the trouble (like I did) to get the other
statutes together – and these are definitely not riveting page-turners, I can tell
you. Still, I didn’t find any changes that seemed really more explosive than what
is fully spelled out in the Patriot Acts.
The huge favorite was the United States Code, which was amended 203 times in
Patriot I and 82 times in Patriot II, of which 190 are directed only to Title 18,
“Crimes and Criminal Procedure.” Title 18 is a massive document indeed, currently
comprising 999,499 words in 122,292 paragraphs, and growing each time it gets
amended. Some of these amendments in the Patriot Acts form stretches of discourse
that are uninformative and, for most Americans, wholly meaningless, such as:
41 “Rule 6(e)(3)(D) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure is amended by

striking ‘(e)(3)(C)(i)’ and inserting ‘(e)(3)(C)(i)(I).’” (I: 203)
42 “Section 2510 of title 18, United States Code, is amended in paragraph

(17), by striking ‘and’ after the semicolon.” (I: 800)
Others at least betray the DoJ’s intentions, for example increasing the penalty
for “wilfully and maliciously setting fire to or burning any building [that is] a
dwelling or if the life of any person be placed in jeopardy” (United States Code)
(see 43 below); or extending surveillance to a suspect’s computer (see 44 below).
43 “Section 81 of title 18, United States Code, is amended in the second unde-
signated paragraph by striking ‘not more than twenty years’ and inserting
‘for any term of years or for life.’” (I: 810)
44 “Section 2511(2)(f) of title 18, United States Code, is amended . . . by

striking ‘wire and oral’ and inserting ‘wire, oral, and electronic.’” (I: 204)
Similarly, mail fraud was augmented by the new felony called “computer fraud and
abuse” (Section 202). The “telephone toll billing records” the DoJ can request for
suspected citizens became “local and long distance telephone connection records, or
records of session times and durations” (Section 210). And the term “chemical” was
deleted in front of “weapons of mass destruction” (Section 104) to make the latter
term more encompassing for items like tubes and trailers.
NEW PATRIOTISM 129
Insisting that prevailing legislation, including Patriot I, is perilously

weak
Apparently, the easy passage of Patriot I gave the DoJ the confidence that even more
“patriotism” could be inflicted on the nation (maybe like that second huge tax cut).
So Patriot II bristled with unintentionally ironic (not to say comic) complaints
against Patriot I for “preventing full utilization” (see 45 below), manifesting “lack
of clarity” and causing “serious practical problems” (see 46 below), “losing valuable
and necessary intelligence exemptions” (see 47 below), “complicating or preventing
prosecution” (see 48 below), and generally “failing to take account of the myriad
ways in which, in the modern world, war can be waged against the United
States” (II: 501).
45 “Typographical and other errors in the USA PATRIOT Act provisions are
preventing prosecutors from fully utilizing that Act’s tools.” (II: 428)
46 “The language utilized [in Patriot I] inadvertently created a lack of clarity

concerning the continued validity of the pre-existing authority of the courts
to issue search warrants for the disclosure of e-mails outside of their dis-
tricts. . .. This threatens to be a serious practical problem when information
gathering in the United States is needed in response to requests by foreign
law enforcement agencies.” (II: 121)
47 “If not corrected, this anomaly [concerning] exceptions from the limitations
on interception and disclosure of wire, oral, and electronic communica-
tions . . . will result in the loss of valuable and necessary intelligence
exemptions to the pen register and trap and trace provisions.” (II: 110)
48 “The existing limitation could complicate or prevent the prosecution of

persons convicted of non-violent terrorist offenses.” (II: 410)
Number 48 oddly seems to complain about the treatment of people who have been
convicted without being prosecuted, which is happens to be just the status of enemy
combatants.
Yet lack of clarity can strategic advantages, as I have pointed out, such as keeping
secret who might be a terrorist after all. Besides, how the “tools” of Patriot I could
be “utilized” more “fully” (see 45 above) than current practices like number 49
(below) is hard to imagine, let alone how typos could be “preventing” it. Here,
for once, the opposite of secrecy was obviously intended. (Perhaps the zeal of the
agents was heightened by invading a town named Moscow.)
49 “The FBI flew in 120 agents, fully-armed in riot gear, on two military
aircraft, to Moscow, Idaho, to arrest one Saudi graduate student for visa
fraud. The raid went down in University of Idaho student housing at 4:30
a.m. in the morning, terrorizing [!] the suspect’s family [and] the families
of neighboring students. . .. At least 20 other students who had the
misfortune to either know the suspect or to have some minor immigration
irregularities were also subjected to substantial, surprise interrogations

(4þ hours). . .” (Professor Elizabeth Brandt, quoted in Al-Ghalib, 2003)
Credit card terrorism indeed.
Insisting that keeping the public informed would “divert valuable

resources”
Secrecy is represented as a means to conserve valuable resources that are then
available for “detecting and incapacitating terrorists:”
50 “The government is forced to divert valuable resources to litigating this

question [i.e., whether to “approve the government’s request” for the
secret “submission of sensitive evidence”]. And even worse, a request
for confidentiality itself can be a security breach: the government risks
disclosing sensitive national-security information simply by explaining in
open court why the information should be redacted.” (II: 204)
51 “Although existing exemptions permit the government to protect

information relating to detainees, defending this interpretation through
litigation requires extensive Department of Justice resources, which would
be better spent detecting and incapacitating terrorists.” (II: 201)
However, my financial tally reveals immense quantities of “valuable resources.” The

real story is that the government feels it doesn’t owe the public any information.
Where have we heard that before?
Insisting that “terrorists” are fearsomely devious and dangerous

Secrecy is repeatedly defended, especially about who has been detained (a term that
sounds like being delayed in traffic) or denied release, emphasising the need to keep
from “tipping off terrorists,” who would “flee,” “accelerate their plans,” or “kill
witnesses:”
52 “Publicizing the fact that a particular alien has been detained could alert
his co-conspirators about the extent of the federal investigation and the
imminence of their own detention, thus provoking them to flee to avoid
detention and prosecution or to accelerate their terrorist plans before
they can be disrupted.” (II: 201)
53 “This section would . . . deny release to persons charged with . . . offenses

that are likely to be committed by terrorists . . . because of the unparalleled
magnitude of the danger to the United States and its people posed by acts of
terrorism, and because terrorism is typically engaged in by groups – many
with international connections – that are often in a position to help their
members flee or go into hiding.” (II: 405)
NEW PATRIOTISM 131
54 “The Patriot Act . . . allows law enforcement to conduct investigations

without tipping off terrorists [who] might flee, destroy evidence, intimidate
or kill witnesses, cut off contact with associates, or take other action to evade
arrest.” (DoJ website)
The other side of the story: if terrorists (revealingly called “aliens” in 52) indeed
sustain a network of international connections, they will know who has been
detained and denied release without reading the court records or police reports
the DoJ wants to keep secret.
Recalling the “aggressive assault on our clean air protections” in Bush’s “Clear
Skies” legislation (number 12) supplies the real story for this remarkable phoney story:
55 “The Clean Air Act . . . requires private companies that use potentially
dangerous chemicals to submit to the Environmental Protection Agency
a ‘worst case scenario’ report detailing what would be the impact on the
surrounding community of release of the specified chemicals.
Such reports are a roadmap for terrorists, who could use the information
to plan attacks on the facilities. . .. The revised section will require that
public access be limited to ‘read-only’ methods, and only to those
persons who live or work in the geographical area likely to be affected
by a worst-case release.” (II: 202)
So to qualify for a “roadmap,” terrorists can go live next door to the dangerous
chemical facilities and see which side gets blown to bits first. (The term “read-
only” means the neighbors can read the information but not remove, copy, or
take notes – II: 202.)
Proposing that national security can be bought with dollars

Patriot I contains a barrelful of provisions that appropriate cash, mostly (surprise) to the
various arms of the DoJ who wrote it. The sums are suspiciously round and enormous:
56 “$200,000,000 for each of the fiscal years 2002, 2003, and 2004. [to the]
Counterterrorism Fund.” (Section 101)
57 “$50,000,000 for fiscal year 2002 and $100,000,000 for fiscal year
2003 . . . [for] Bureau of Justice Assistance . . . [for] establishing and
operating secure information sharing systems.” (Section 701)
58 $25,000,000 in “each of the fiscal years 2003 through 2007 . . . [for]

antiterrorism training grants . . . [in] intelligence gathering and analysis
techniques.” (Section 1005)
59 “$50,000,000 each to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the

United States Customs Service . . . [to] improve technology for monitoring
the Northern Border.” (Section 402)
60 “not less than $2,000,000 . . . [for] enhancing the Integrated Automated

Fingerprint Identification System.” (Section 405)
61 $36,800,000 for “implementing the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immi-

grant Responsibility Act . . . [and] monitoring foreign students.” (Section 416)
62 Up to $250,000 for “paying rewards” to citizens recruited by “public

advertisements” to “assist the Department of Justice to combat terrorism
and defend the Nation.” (Section 501)
63 Up to $5,000,000 for the secretary of state to make similar awards, and

more if a “larger amount is necessary to combat terrorism or defend the
Nation.” (Section 502)
64 $50,000,000 “in each fiscal year . . . [t] provide training and education for
Federal, State, and local law enforcement personnel and prosecutors
regarding investigations, forensic analyses, and prosecutions of computer-
related crime (including cyberterrorism).” (Section 816)
65 “$5,000,000 for fiscal year 2002 for regional antidrug training in the
Republic of Turkey by the Drug Enforcement Administration for police,
as well as increased precursor chemical control efforts in the South and
Central Asia region.” (Section 1005)
66 $250,000 to “study and report to Congress on the feasibility of providing

to airlines access via computer to the names of passengers who are suspected
of terrorist activity.” (Section 1009)
67 $50,000,000 “set aside . . . [by the] Director of Crime Victims Fund . . . in

response to the airplane hijackings and terrorist acts that occurred on
September 11, 2001, as an antiterrorism emergency reserve.” (Section
621)
68 $250,000,000 in “each of fiscal years 2002 through 2007 for antiterrorism

grants to states and localities” under the “Crime Identification Technology
Act.” (Section 1015)
69 $20,000,000 “in fiscal year 2002” for the “Defense Threat Reduction
Agency.” (Section 1016).
To simplify calculations, I shall assume that no special rewards and awards for
“defending the Nation” (Sections 501 –502) will be issued, even though fresh hand-
outs to political or corporate allies is daily practice for the crony capitalism of the
Bush team (Begala, 2002; Conason, 2003).
Again to simplify calculations, I shall assume that, unless specified otherwise, the
funding covers at least 2002– 2004. On that basis, I computed the minimum cost of
NEW PATRIOTISM 133
the Act for the taxpayer coming to $2,927,250,000. Yet the real cost will be far
higher, because the Act also authorizes “such sums as may be necessary” to:
70 “maintain the government-wide data access service and the financial crimes
communications center . . . for fiscal years 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005.”
(Section 361)
71 “fully implement the integrated entry and exit data system for airports,
seaports, and land border ports of entry.” (Section 414)
72 “develop . . . the technological basis for a cross-agency, cross-platform

electronic system . . . to share law enforcement and intelligence infor-
mation necessary to confirm the identity of such persons applying for a
United States visa.” (Section 403)
73 “carry out a program to provide appropriate training in identifying [and]

utilizing foreign intelligence information.” (Section 907)
74 “triple the number of Border Patrol personnel, Customs Service personnel,

and INS inspectors [for] protecting the northern border.” (Section 401)
75 “make a grant to each State . . . to prepare for and respond to terrorist acts
including events of terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction and
biological, nuclear, radiological, incendiary, chemical, and explosive
devices.” (Section 1014)
To judge by the suspiciously round sums specified in the Act, these blanks checks will
be just as exorbitant. Undoubtedly, the self-serving allotment of all these
“allocations” would have been cut back during a genuine congressional debate –
another compelling reason for not having any (see numbers 22 and 23).
In vain I scoured the discourse of Patriot I for some concrete explanation of how
millions of dollars actually translate into antiterrorism training or “defending the
Nation.” Evidently, an arsenal of high technology is to be purchased and unleashed
on the prior assumption that terrorism – like those famous weapons of mass destruc-
tion that turn up only on paper, as in number 74 – will be found if you just look hard
enough. The prospective gadgetry is literally endless:
76 “Iris, retina, and fingerprint scanners; hand-geometry assayers; remote

video-network surveillance; face-recognition software; smart cards with
custom identification chips; decompressive baggage checkers that vacuum-
extract minute chemical samples from inside suitcases; tiny radio implants
beneath the skin that continually broadcast people’s identification codes;
pulsed fast-neutron analysis of shipping containers. . .” (Mann, 2002)
In return, I noticed some curious omissions in the financing. Agents are to be trained
in “utilizing foreign intelligence information” but no mention is made of them learn-
ing foreign languages, perhaps because that wouldn’t sound expensive enough. Cash
is piled up “protecting the northern border” (perhaps with a chain-link fence made
of US coins with a nice doublespeak name like “Penny Blockade” or “Necklace of
Nickels” or “Borders of Quarters”?), but none for the southern border, notorious
for smuggling (a concession to NAFTA?). Or again, antidrug funds go to Turkey
and South and Central Asia (I: 1005), but not Latin America – (singling out
Muslim nations?). The relevance of drugs to the war on terrorism has been a
talking point of the president:
77 “If you’re doing drugs, you’re helping terrorists. . .. While stopping just
short of calling drug users terrorist co-conspirators, Bush argued that,
because many terrorist organizations worldwide are financed in part by
drug trafficking, quitting drugs may in some ways help cut off the flow of
money to groups like al-Qaeda.” (Associated Press)
The other side of that story: al-Qaeda is financed by oil money.
Proposing to enlist a huge contingent of civilian informants

To back up all that hi-tech, you can recruit an army of civilian informants to do the
looking too:
78 “In one of the most misguided responses to the terrorist attacks, President
Bush is proposing a program to recruit one million volunteers to act as
spies and informants against their neighbors. Initially, the proposed
program would have recruited letter carriers, utility workers, cable instal-
lers, and workers in the transportation, trucking, shipping, maritime, and
mass transit industries, whose jobs allow them access to private residences
to report ‘suspicious’ activity.” (American Civil Liberties Union, 2002)
Even if these patriotic volunteers don’t get a salary, they would certainly cost the gov-
ernment plenty if a “tip” can send “120 agents, fully-armed in riot gear, on two military
aircraft .. [to] arrest one Saudi graduate student for visa fraud” (see number 49).
This army of spies was providentially blocked by Congress. But then the new
approved Department of Homeland Security boasts no small personnel, among
them a multitude of “watchers”:
79 “The six-month-old Department of Homeland Security has 40 percent of its

160,000 employees working as ‘watchers’ at airports at average salaries of
$29,000 but also pays 324 funeral directors, 128 pharmacists, 55 general
anthropologists, 41 fingerprint specialists and 30 chaplains.” (McFeatters,
2003)
80 “The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse . . . a data distribution

project at Syracuse, said that DHS, one of 15 Cabinet-level departments,
now employs one of every 12 workers in the federal government.”
(McFeatters, 2003)
NEW PATRIOTISM 135
And informants with a really hot tip for “defending the Nation” can still expect a
lovely reward from those allocations to DoJ ($250,000 – see number 62) and the
State Department ($5,000,000 – see number 63).
Vowing that national security demands unprecedented surveillance of

citizens
The major use of high technology will doubtless be in projects like the “national
network of electronic crime task forces” to be developed by the Secret Service
(I: 105), though the latter’s legal mandate is to protect the president. Here we
have the most obtrusive move toward a maximum of secrecy for the government
and a minimum for its citizens. The Patriot I Act accordingly authorizes the broadest
interception: not just via “wiretaps,” “pen registers” (which monitor outgoing
telephone calls) and “trap and trace devices” (which monitor incoming calls)
(sections 214, 216), and “seizure of voice-mail messages” (Section 209), but also
via information from Internet service providers about a citizen’s web surfing,
e-mails, chat sites, special interest groups, membership of organizations, and so
on – all channelled to “computer forensic laboratories for seized or intercepted
computer evidence relating to criminal activity (including cyberterrorism)”
(Section 816). You need not even be the one under investigation; the interceptor
merely needs “reasonable grounds to believe that the contents will be relevant to
the investigation” (Section 217). For good measure, immunity from court action
is granted to “any provider of a wire or electronic communication service” that
“furnishes information” (Section 225). We should keep in mind here that, with
the major news media being tamed, cowed or bought up, the Internet is a prime
medium for information and resistance to the Bush team, who would gain much
by criminalizing it as the arena for “cyberterrorism” (a hazy sci-fi term the Act
nowhere explains – perhaps meaning websites like bushwatch.com, bushandcheney-
suck.com, or toostupidtobepresident.com, so far still posted). And we have already
seen the mission of the “New American Century” to “take total control of cyber-
space” (Section 4).
Secrecy is also sustained by granting immunity to citizens who “furnish a con-
sumer report of a consumer and all other information in a consumer’s file to a
government agency”; in return, they are forbidden to “disclose to any person, or
specify in any consumer report, that a government agency has sought or obtained
access to information” (I: 626). Again, consumers are placed in a context together
with terrorists, even if they only misuse their credit cards (compare to number 29).
Moreover, not complying with a request can be dangerous:
81 “In the case of a refusal to comply with a request for records, a report, or
other information . . . the court may issue an order requiring the person to
comply with the request. Any failure to obey the order of the court may be
punished by the court as contempt thereof.” (II: 128)
82 “if a person refuses to comply with an order of the court to cooperate in

the installation of a pen register or trap and trace device . . . the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court has the same authority . . . to impose

contempt sanctions.” (II: 109)
The penalties for publicly disclosing that you have “provided access by authorized
investigative agencies to financial records and information, consumer reports, and
travel records” (II: 129) can be even worse:
83 “This Subsection makes it an offense for an officer of a financial institution

to notify other persons about a grand jury subpoena or an administrative
subpoena issued by the Department of Justice for records of the financial
institution. The offense is punishable by up to a year of imprisonment, or
up to five years of imprisonment if the disclosure was made with the
intent to obstruct a judicial proceeding.” (II: 129)
The irony of naming this “offense” an “unlawful disclosure” (II: 129) is all the
more pungent because prior to the outbreak of patriotism, precisely these secret
provisions of access to government agents were themselves unlawful.
Patriot II goes further still by authorizing surveillance of your entire computer
(stiffly called a “multi-functional device”):
84 “This section . . . makes it clear that authorization of electronic surveillance

with respect to a device, unless otherwise specified, may be relied on to
intercept and access communications through any of the device’s functions.
The section also effectively allows a search warrant for other information
retrievable from the device (whether or not related to the intercepted
communications) to be combined with the electronic surveillance order.”
(II: 124)
So the warrant doesn’t even specify which information to search for: agents can just
go fishing in your hard disks and e-mails for anything they can use against you. (My
keynote address to a CDA conference in Yemen, which was the original motive for
this report, would probably buy me a quick trip to Guantanamo and my own set of
shackles.)
Placing the responsibility on “aliens”

The Section authorizing “mandatory detention of suspected terrorists” prominently
cites “aliens” as the potential terrorists to be arrested and deported on belief of
“endangering the national security”:
85 “The Attorney General shall take into custody any alien . . . until the alien
is removed from the United States . . . if [the DoJ] has reasonable grounds to
believe that the alien . . . is engaged in any activity that endangers the
national security of the United States.” (I: 412)
Aliens were vindictively warned when the Attorney General addressed a meeting of
US mayors:
NEW PATRIOTISM 137
86 “If you overstay your visa – even by one day – we will arrest you. If you
violate a local law, you will be kept in custody as long as possible. . .. We
will use all our weapons within the law. . .” (US Department of State, 2001)
Apparently, those weapons include having your face slammed into a wall (see
number 36).
Patriot II legalizes sudden deportation, officially called “expedited removal”
(according to one section, within 14 days), for “all aliens, not just nonpermanent
residents”; and “expands the expedited-removal-triggering crimes to inclu-
de . . . possession of controlled substances, firearms offenses, espionage, sabotage,
treason, threats against the President, violations of the Trading with the Enemy
Act, draft evasion, and certain alien smuggling crimes” – these excoriated as “far
more serious than aggravated felonies” (II: 504).
So permanent residents are not exempt:
87 “Nor is there any reason to distinguish between aliens who are permanent
residents and aliens who are not: for both types of aliens, the fact of a
criminal conviction suffices to establish that a person is removable.”
(II: 504)
Whether illegal activities have been committed is declared irrelevant (see number
88); and acts need merely “appear to be intended” (see number 89), much as in
“domestic terrorism” back in number 25.
88 “Requiring the additional showing that the intelligence gathering . . . on

behalf of a foreign power . . . violates the laws of the United States is
both unnecessary and counterproductive, as such activities threaten the
national security regardless of whether they are illegal.” (II: 101)
89 “The definition of ‘international terrorism’ . . . covers acts which by their

nature appear to be intended for the stated purposes. Hence, there would
be no requirement to show that the defendants actually had such an intent.”
(II: 402)
And where an alien may get removed to doesn’t matter either:
90 “The Attorney General may direct that an alien be removed to any country
or region regardless of whether the country or region has a government,
recognized by the United States or otherwise.” (II: 503)
By not requiring that aliens just be removed to their native countries, the DoJ has a
pretext not for sending repugnant specimens home to friendly allies like Britain but,
rather, say, to the North Pole, where something besides their assets will get frozen.
And the Act seems to say as much:
91 “The Attorney General may direct that the alien be removed to another
country or region if . . . removal to any country [is] impracticable, inadvis-
able, or impossible.” (II: 503)
Astoundingly, even US citizens can get the boot by being declared aliens merely on
the basis of an inferred intent, which again need not be shown, as in number 58.
92 “An American can relinquish his citizenship [and] be expatriated if, with
the intent to relinquish nationality, he becomes a member of, or provides
material support to, a group that the United States has designated as a
‘terrorist organization’, if that group is engaged in hostilities against
the United States. . .. The intent to relinquish nationality need not be
manifested in words, but can be inferred from conduct.” (II: 501)
So drop that falafel with hummus and grab a Big Mac with freedom fries.
Equating protest or resistance with aid to terrorists

After Bush Jr proclaimed to the world “you are either for us or for the terrorists” in
September 2001, the official response to protest or resistance should be a foregone
conclusion, viz.:
93 “Those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liber-

ty . . . only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish
our resolve; . . . they give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to
America’s friends.” (Ashcroft defending Patriot I before the Senate Com-
mittee on the Judiciary, December, 2001, “Ashcroft: critics of new terror
measures”)
Yet few issues have split the nation as sharply as the Patriot Acts, which also imply
that Mr Ashcroft’s America has countless enemies and few friends. The same
response is all too predictable for protests against unprovoked war:
94 “‘You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group pro-
testing a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international ter-
rorism, you might have terrorism at that protest’, said Van Winkle, of the
[California] State Justice Department. ‘You can almost argue that a protest
against that is a terrorist act.’” (Hoffman, Holstege, & Richman, 2003)
Public opposition or criticism against the acts and policies of President Bush has already
triggered serious consequences. At least three newspaper editors have been fired,23 and
three university professors disciplined:24 one of these, Sami Al-Arian, was soon fired as
well and then arrested after being publicly harassed by Bill O’Reilly on the Fox
Channel and the Tampa Tribune, the latter claiming the FBI had known him to be a “ter-
rorist leader” for years but hadn’t gotten around to arresting him until 2003, during
which interval he had been photographed with the then-candidate Bush Jr (for whom
NEW PATRIOTISM 139
he campaigned), and his son Abdullah had been invited into the White House to help
lure Muslims into the “faith-based initiative.”25
“Patriotic” thought-police are busily monitoring a range of discourses for objec-
tionable or “anti-American” statements (see especially Chang, 2002):
95 “The American Council of Trustees and Alumni issued a report in November,

2001, listing 117 allegedly anti-American statements made on college
campuses, [and] calling professors ‘the weak link in America’s response’. In
March, 2002, the Americans for Victory Over Terrorism released its list of
‘objectionable’ statements from professors, legislators, and writers who,
it claims, ‘misunderstand [American] ideals and their practice’ – among
others, former President Jimmy Carter. . .. Both organizations have close
ties to the Administration.” (“USA PATRIOT Act six months later”)
Mere high school students who speak up in class can get interrogated and terrorized by
the Secret Service:
96 “On 4/23, Secret Service agents visited Oakland High and interrogated two
16 year-old male students in connection with comments they had allegedly
made during a classroom discussion concerning President Bush and the U.S.
Government’s role in Iraq. When one of the students asked . . . could he talk
to them later with a lawyer present, the agents told him, ‘We own you, if
you don’t talk to us now, and we find out you haven’t told us everything,
we’ll put you motherfuckers in federal prison.” (Felson & Lopez, 2003)
Anchorman Dan Rather expressed his “worry that patriotism run amok will trample
the very values that the country seeks to defend in a constitutional republic based on
the principles of democracy” (BBC Press Release, 2002). Indeed.
Outlook
As of October 2003, 200 communities in 34 states have passed resolutions opposing
Patriot I, though these are largely symbolic, given the DoJ’s utter contempt for its
opponents supposedly “aiding terrorism.” So far, Patriot Act II has not been formally
introduced into Congress, thanks to having been quickly made public. Perhaps it was
a trial balloon (no pun intended). Or perhaps the DoJ is waiting for another major
terrorist strike to set the mood.
Intriguingly, on January 9, 2003, the same day Patriot II was secretly forwarded to
Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, the full Senate witnessed the formal introduction
of Senate Bill S. 22, called the “Justice Enhancement and Domestic Security Act” with
482 pages, by a list of Democrats reading like a Who’s Who of left-wing liberalism (by
my own definitions), including Tom Daschle (presenter), Edward Kennedy, Hilary
Clinton, Joseph Biden, Patrick Leahy, Charles Schumer, Mark Dayton, Richard
Durbin, Jon Corzine, and Jack Reed. Despite the similarity of title, presumably a
coincidence given the timing, this bill was intended to redirect the legislating trend
of Patriot I (which it occasionally cites).26 Senate Bill S. 22 does “provide $12
billion over three years to support public safety officers in their efforts to protect
homeland security and prevent and respond to acts of terrorism.” But the agenda is
utterly distinct from Patriot II. Support is projected for protection of children
against abuse, abduction, and pornography; protection of the elderly (“seniors”)
against crime and against mistreatment in nursing homes; assistance to victims
of crime; compensation of persons wrongfully convicted; benefits for officers
(“hometown heroes”) injured or incapacitated while on duty; protection of the
cultural and archaeological history of native Americans; protection of whistleblowers
in government agencies; increased use of DNA in sexual assault investigations; rescue
of innocent persons from the death penalty; and drug education and prevention pro-
grams, including drug treatment alternatives to prison. Tougher laws are projected
not for locking up people who refuse to provide information to the government or
have disclosed that they did so, but for “identity theft” of social security or bank
account numbers; immigration of war criminals and human rights abusers; perpetra-
tion of toxic hoaxes; and sale of firearms to juveniles and believed delinquents.
I downloaded the bill from the website of the Congressional Record27 for January
9, 2003, but, to judge from the Internet, the bill has received far less publicity that
its counterpart Patriot II, and that almost entirely only about its controversial sec-
tions on drugs and gun control. I find no confirmation that it has been brought to
a vote, and Bush would instantly veto it anyway. So it remains a counter-discourse
symbolizing for me at least the other face of America.
At this stage, any course but ideological and discursive deconstruction and
reconstruction points the way to economic and ecological disaster. Right-wing
mass media have created a discursive vacuum in which patriotism would be associated
such constitutional rights as freedom of speech and opinion, protection of privacy,
and a fair open trial by one’s peers – all of which the Patriot Acts are intended
to abrogate, and with methods that deserve to be called terrorism themselves.
This vacuum must be speedily filled by a mass exercise of free speech too populous
and too determined to be silenced and forced into secrecy.
Now more than ever, CDA is called upon for its critical perspective and discur-
sive engagements with ideological discourse, whether public or confidential. Our
status as discourses analysts must be intimately balanced with our status as deeply
concerned citizens in a vertiginously polarizing world, and as practitioners of a
counter-discourse of economic and ecological sanity.
Notes
1 For texts accessed electronically, page numbers are not available.
2 Historically the model may have been the German Democratic Republic, which
might well have been named “People’s Republic” (“Volksrepublik”) like its
eastern neighbours, but for having to stand out against the Federal Republic.
3 At http://www.newamericancentury.org jwww.newamericancentury.org
4 Known as the “Father of the House of Commons,” and famous for speaking his mind.
This quote appeared in Nimmo (2002). See also Lobe (2002) and the “Chicken Hawk
Database” of the New Hampshire Gazette at http://www.nhgazette.com/chickenhawks.
html. None of the Bush regime but Colin Powell have seen combat.
NEW PATRIOTISM 141
5 It was posted by the “Elect Our Public Defender” website at http://www.electpd.

org/hr3162.pdf, but when I tried to reopen it in December 2003, I got dumped into
PerfectNav.com, which is apparently the Internet equivalent of “sayonara, sucker!”
6 Hereafter I cite just the section numbers and, where, not otherwise clear, the Act
number precedes, for example (I: 102).
7 At http://www.infowars.com/print_patriotact2_analysis.htm. This is a PDF
document composed entirely of undecodable bitmaps evidently made by a
scanner. A transcription of the “Section-By-Section Analysis” into text is kindly
provided at http://www.dlncoalition.org/patext.htm
8 At http://www.aclu.org/Files/getFile.cfm?id ¼ 11812
9 Barbara Comstock, Director of Public Affairs for the Justice Department, denied it
was forwarded. But the “Department of Justice control sheet” proving this trans-
action was obtained by PBS and is posted at http://ww.publicintegrity.org/
dtaweb/downloads/Story_01_020703_Doc_2.pdf
10 Follow the “Patriot II” link at http://www.publicintegrity.org where a helpful
summary is also provided. A PDF version composed of bitmaps made by a
scanner is at http://www.infowars.com/print_patriotact2_analysis.htm
11 Available at http://www.compulang.com.
12 Other interesting frequencies: “Attorney General” 121, “Secretary of the
Treasury” 49, “Secretary of State” 45, but “Secretary of Defense” just 2. Shows
who’s running the war on terrorism.
13 At http://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/6000-100.html
14 At http://www.ahk.com/technica.html
15 At http://www.fda.gov/opacom/laws/cntrlsub/ctlsbtoc.htm
16 At http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/archive/topics/cita
17 At http://www.ftc.gov/os/statutes/fcra.pdf
19 At http://www.fourmilab.ch/uscode/8usc/www/sections.html
21 At http://www.lectlaw.com/files/stf02.htm
22 At http://uscode.house.gov/download.htm
23 Tom Gutting, of the Texas City Sun; Dan Guthrie of the Grant’s Pass Dial; and Tim
McCarthy of the Littleton Courier.
24 Kenneth Hearlson, Orange Coast College; Richard Berthold, University of New
Mexico; and Sami Al-Arian, University of South Florida
25 If you have a strong stomach, you can read the Tribune’s exultant screed “The
Scorching Indictment Of Sami Al-Arian” (February 21 2003) which praised the
“yeoman service” of its own reporter who has been targeting Al-Arian since
1995 until O’Reilly viciously helped them out.
26 I found the charge that it incorporated “many provisions” of Patriot II as “pork
barrel riders” (Alex Jones) utterly untrue; and, given the timing, I doubt its
authors could have even seen Patriot II.
27 Via the site http://www.dancesafe.org/new/articles/s22.pdf
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Critical Discourse Studies

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CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

Keywords ecologism; discursivism; patriotism, terrorism; secrecy

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

Defining critical discourse analysis

Critical Discourse Studies Vol. 1, No. 1 April 2004, pp. 113–145

a counter-discourse of economic and ecological sanity, whereas a non-critical stance

Language, discourse, and ideology

1 “The essential criteria of an ideology [are its] deviations from scientiﬁc

If science is grasped within the wider environments of society, as scientists are

2 “Every self-respecting ideology develops its own complex defence mechan-

3 “This ideology of the state is coercively implemented in the policing,

Some analyses within the ﬁeld of CDA suggest similar reservations:

4 “Ideology is signiﬁcations generated within power relations as a dimension of

5 “Ideologies are particular ways of representing and constructing society

6 “Ideology supports violence and is critically shaped by and in a context

7 “Ideologies may be succinctly deﬁned as the basis of the social representations

Introducing ecologism: let’s start from democracy

In theory, democracy is a state ideology clearly aimed at universal inclusion and

“decruiting” (Council of Residential Specialists), a “career transition program”

12 “I believe the results of focusing our attention and energy on teaching

Here, a specious equation is proffered between a presumed record of corporate and

Taking office for the “New American Century”

Patriotism and secrecy

21 “The Nation is called upon to recognize the patriotism of fellow citizens

23 “Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) told the Washington Times that no

24 “When you carefully consider FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests

Using the term “terrorism” continually or in expansive senses and

27 “The only answer is ethnic proﬁling. Every Middle-eastern-looking truck

28 “Hundreds of Iranian and other Middle East citizens were in southern

Expansive too is having terrorism cover “intimidating civilians” (unless the

Deploying the extraordinary category of “enemy combatant”

32 “The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which

Once again, the DoJ emitted a phoney story cloaked in doublespeak:

38 “The federal government implicitly threatened to toss the defendants into a

39 “Solicitor General Ted Olsen argued, in a recent legal brief, there is no

Ted Olsen allegedly once “wrote articles anonymously in the American

Making dense, often fragmented references to other statutes

40 “Congress simply took existing legal principles and retroﬁtted them to

41 “Rule 6(e)(3)(D) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure is amended by

42 “Section 2510 of title 18, United States Code, is amended in paragraph

44 “Section 2511(2)(f) of title 18, United States Code, is amended . . . by

Insisting that prevailing legislation, including Patriot I, is perilously

46 “The language utilized [in Patriot I] inadvertently created a lack of clarity

48 “The existing limitation could complicate or prevent the prosecution of

irregularities were also subjected to substantial, surprise interrogations

Credit card terrorism indeed.

Insisting that keeping the public informed would “divert valuable

50 “The government is forced to divert valuable resources to litigating this

51 “Although existing exemptions permit the government to protect

However, my ﬁnancial tally reveals immense quantities of “valuable resources.” The

Insisting that “terrorists” are fearsomely devious and dangerous

53 “This section would . . . deny release to persons charged with . . . offenses

54 “The Patriot Act . . . allows law enforcement to conduct investigations