Analysis of media coverage and political responses to the suicide attack on the NATO (ISAF) headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan on 15 August 2009 illustrates the presence of a pattern of established conventions that structure the representation of suicide terror events. The framework described by these conventions incorporates a range of implicit but deeply inscribed assumptions concerning the origins and motivations of terrorists in general, and suicide terrorists in particular. These assumptions predate the events of 11 September 2001, but received their clearest articulation in the aftermath of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. The vocabulary associated with the “War Against Terror”, and the constructions of terrorism and terrorist to which it gives rise, are identified and contested through discussion of available demographic data pertaining to suicide terrorism, to the discourse of the “clash of civilizations” associated with the work of S. P. Huntington, and to the paradoxically commensurable self-presentation of suicide terrorists themselves. Analysis of these materials significantly undermines accounts of cause and motivation that seek to explain suicide terrorism in terms of religious fundamentalism and economic deprivation. Disputes concerning global military policies, and claims against perceived territorial interference, emerge as being of greater significance. The conventions established within the prevailing assumptions and frameworks adopted in the course of media productions are, however, firmly established and not readily susceptible to adaptation or control. By critically challenging this established framework, however, and exposing its assumptions and limits to scrutiny, the possibility of redescription, and over time to the reframing, of currently prevailing perceptions and representations of both terrorism in general and suicide terror in particular, can be envisaged but not guaranteed.