The National Counterterrorism Center's Definitional Shift for Counting Terrorism: Use of Loci Communes and Embedded Value Hierarchies

Abstract

After the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act granted the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) responsibility for producing the nation's annual report on terrorism, the NCTC shifted the definitional methodology for counting acts of global terrorism utilized previously by the State Department and CIA. This essay will summarize key definitional changes, show how the NCTC employed loci communes to justify its new methodology, and reveal the underlying value hierarchies of the agency during the Bush presidency. In the process it will demonstrate how an advocate's simultaneous use of antithetical loci pairings function as critical sites for discerning changing value hierarchies.

Key Words:

• National Counterterrorism Center
• terrorism statistics
• loci communes
• loci of quantity
• loci of quality