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This paper contributes to the growing academic literature of Critical Terrorism Studies. It does so by tracing the ways in which the George W. Bush administration narrated the unfolding War on Terror around specific and distinct conceptions of temporality. Claims to temporal discontinuity, linearity, and timelessness, it is argued, were all central to the writing of this conflict, and helped to inscribe significance, coherence, and normative integrity into the counter-terrorism ‘war’. By tracing the emergence and implications of these heterogeneous writings, this paper reflects on the productivity of temporality as a discursive resource and contributes to the denaturalisation of the War on Terror’s ostensibly descriptive construction already underway within existing debates.