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This is a war that may never end,' announced Vice-President Dick Cheney after the 11 September atrocities-a striking statement from a government which knows how much power it has. Careful use of language has been one of the first casualties in the US since that fateful date. There is first and foremost the cowboy vocabulary of President George W Bush, and his hyperbole ('America is the greatest source of good in the whole of human history'). But the inflammatory statements of the US media ('swift-kill the bastards','bomb them into basketball courts') seem also to appeal to a public that has been convinced that 'to question the war or dissent from the way it is conducted is unpatriotic' (pi46). We think of the US as a country with a stronger attachment than any other to free expression. So it is alarming to see how the horror of Ground Zero has diminished its capacity for tolerance and debate. Certainly civil liberties are now under threat. They have become a fragile filling, sandwiched between the imperatives of the law and order crowd and fears about more ruthless and desperate acts of terrorism. A CNN poll revealed that 45% of Americans would not object to the use of torture if it provided information about terrorism. Index examines the disturbing scope of the restrictions on civil liberties both in the US (p22) and the UK (pi3). We also attempt to unravel some definitions of terrorism (of the many now current, few have any legal pretensions), and examine how national liberation movements ('terrorists') and state terror ('the war against terrorism') fare when subjected to the same criteria (p46). Meanwhile, the blurring of definitions criticised by Freimut Duve (pl81) has given carte blanche to others to mimic America and conduct their own 'wars on terror'-Vladimir Putin in Chechnya (p30), Ariel Sharon in Gaza and the West Bank, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe (where he recently claimed journalists as his own brand of'terrorists') and Isseyas Aferwerki in Eritrea (p56). And the official press in Beijing makes it evident that the Chinese authorities are taking the opportunity to deal with their Uigur dissidents-'Islamic terrorists'-in Xinjaing once and for all. These are dangerous times. Free expression is vital if we are to get the difficult balance between freedom and security right. In the world's most powerful democracy, too much licence is being taken with language and too many debates are being stifled. G INDEX ON CENSORSHIP I 2OO2

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Why is an ever growing group of articulate, dedicated people achieving so little?