Political Communications: Bush, Blair and Bin Laden

Abstract

In this chapter I am specifically concerned with tracing out some aspects of political communications in the war on terror, understood as forms of image munitions. I explore how ‘official’ political communications by leaders (specifically American presidents and British prime ministers) have become an important instrument in disseminating information from the seat of power to the people in times of war and peace, and how new media technologies have played an important part in the development of contemporary political communications. In addition, I explore how the format of presidential and prime ministerial television addresses has since been adopted by al-Qaeda and applied to Osama bin Laden’s ‘unofficial’ political communications. Then, drawing on Andrew Hill’s Lacanian analysis of the bin Laden tapes, I consider the ghostly and lingering presence of bin Laden in the war on terror. Attention then turns towards a discussion of the circulation of bin Laden’s counter-image munitions, drawing on Binoy Kampmark’s work on the spectre of bin Laden and considering the complexity of such images by closely examining the remediations of bin Laden’s counter-image munitions and their manifestations in a number of different interventions.