You will prepare and submit a term paper on Analysis of Text Using CDA. Your paper should be a minimum of 1500 words in length. The piece is posted in the opinion section of a reputable newspaper, and as such, carries the weight of authority and of reasoned judgments and thinking on subject matters of great national interest. The writer is not an ordinary citizen sending a letter to the editor, but a reputable columnist who is a pillar of the newspaper, and has a wide reputation of being a conservative on the various causes and issues that she tackles. Here her conservatism shines through, emphasizing the hard facts on the war on drugs as she calls it, and de-emphasizing the human elements of the executions. Yes, the two are worthy of empathy, according to her, but they were also hardened drug criminals. The genre thus draws the line between the human and the objective legal implications of the executions (Devine 2015. SourceWatch 2015).

The discussion on the war on drugs is done in the context of the deliberate efforts of the Australian government to reduce drug trafficking and use in Australia from decades of high rates for both, and the implicit support of the Australian people for the drug war. The success of the drug efforts is the culmination of steps taken by the Australian government from 2000 onwards to win the drug war, and those steps include information sharing with other governments relating to drug criminals and syndicates. Those very same efforts led to the arrest, conviction, and execution of Chan and Sukumaran. It is worth noting that this explicit framing of the discussion on drugs in terms of the drug war and the support of the Australian people for the drug war is done with an explicit contrasting reference to the execution, and here the juxtaposition of the war on drugs and the picture of the two-drug criminals bring the framing into clear focus. The picture of the two convicts, shown at the top of the opinion piece, also puts forward in dramatic fashion the way the opinion piece frames its arguments in terms of the human empathic elements of the executions versus the lost war on drugs that has equally deadly consequences for those who are victims of drug crimes.