War & Peace Quote by Ed Markey

Markey’s line flips a post-9/11 slogan inside out, using the muscle memory of “war on terror” language to indict a practice the U.S. has too often tried to treat as a regrettable tool rather than a moral red line. The intent is polemical but strategically conservative: redefine “terrorism” not as an identity (“them”) but as a method (“what people do”), then argue torture belongs in the same bucket. It’s a rhetorical jiu-jitsu move designed for a political culture that responds to security framing; if you insist we’re fighting terror, then torture can’t be smuggled in as a necessary evil. It has to be targeted as the enemy.

The subtext is a rebuke to the euphemism industry: “enhanced interrogation,” legal memos that launder cruelty into procedure, and the comforting notion that democracies can brutalize people without becoming brutal. By making torturers the object of the “war,” Markey also dodges the partisan trap of focusing on specific administrations while still pointing at the entire architecture that enabled abuse: black sites, outsourced detention, degraded oversight.

Context matters because the phrase “war against terrorism” is usually a permission slip for exceptionalism. Markey repurposes it as a constraint. That inversion is the point: torture doesn’t just violate law and values; it undercuts counterterrorism itself by fueling recruitment, corroding alliances, and poisoning evidence. The line aims to restore a boundary in a space where fear tends to erase them, and to force the audience to choose which “security” they mean - the kind that protects bodies, or the kind that excuses breaking them.