The fear of terrorism is used to justify the drone state. Justifies Colonialism and killing with impunity.

The articulation of a series of carceral and genocidal caesurae predicated on biopolitically separating out the human/culture from the animal/vestibule must be tracked back to those foundational moments of colonial violence that continue to shape and inform the US nation. Spillers' concept of the vestibule works to articulate a defining feature of colonial violence; specifically, a seriality of power that survives by being flexible and adaptive to different geopolitical sites and bodies. Moreover, this colonial violence must be seen, in the context of the US's ongoing war on terror, as operating at once intra- and internationally; the two categories conjoined through the concept of 'relational geographies.' 'Relational geographies' is a term coined by Trevor Paglen in his detailed identification and mapping of 'black sites,' that is, secret government and military sites that are beyond public scrutiny and accountability. 56 One of the black sites that Paglen discusses is Nellis Range, Nevada, occupying Western Shoshone land. Created in 1940, Nellis Range has been described as 'the single largest gunnery range in the world' and 'the single largest "peacetime militarized zone on earth." '57 The Western Shoshone peoples, the traditional owners of this land, call the Western Shoshone nation 'the most bombed nation on earth.' In his analysis of Nellis Range, which houses one of the ground control centres for the international operation of drones, Paglen insistently draws attention to the past history of white colonial invasion and violent displacement of the Native Americans of the region and the contemporary relations of violence exercised by the US state in their ongoing persecution of Indigenous Americans attempting to claim back lands sequestered by the US government in their establishment of black sites and areas for nuclear weapons testing. He describes being welcomed into a trailer in Crescent Valley, Nevada, that was home to the Western Shoshone Defense Project, and from this remote location, an elderly Native American woman named Carrie Dann and her staff of two full-timers and two part-timers take on the military, the Bureau of Land Management, mining and defense contractors, and the US government itself. Dann says that the United States has been illegally occupying Western Shoshone land for 150 years and that she has the paperwork to prove it. Paglen documents the repeated violent raids that Dann and her people are compelled to endure. The US state has repeatedly attempted to charge Dann and her people with trespassing on government land. This a charge that Dann derisively rejects, arguing that she cannot be accused of trespassing 'land she saw as rightly belonging to her people' precisely because 'the Shoshone NEVER gave, ceded, or sold their land to the United States government, by treaty or otherwise.' In the face of this defiance, the US government has attempted to crush Western Shoshone resistance by deploying the full arsenal of state terror, including federal agents, helicopters, a plane and a fleet of All-Terrain Vehicles: ' "I could not help but think of how this is how our ancestors felt when they saw the cavalry coming. So many of my people were killed on this land and now it's happening again." The Feels rounded up Dann's cattle and loaded them into trucks to be sold at auction. The ranch was devastated.'62 Paglen connects this national exercise of contemporary colonialism and state-violence to the larger, transnational picture he has been delineating in order to underscore the system of continuities that hold between the two: 'For the collection of [Native American] activists sitting in an unmarked trailer in the recesses of Nevada's vast valleys, the black world is much more than an array of sites connected through black aircraft, encrypted communications, and classified careers. It is the power to create geographies, to create places where anything can happen, and to do it with impunity.'63 The enormity of this power to create geographies while simultaneously obliterating others is perhaps best exemplified by the Pentagon's ambitious proposal to create a virtual 'drone state' that will further expropriate large tracts of Native American land, creating 'the largest Joint Forces Future Combat Systems training site in the world':61 'Under this plan, 7 million acres (or 11,000 square miles) of land in the southwest corner of Colorado, and 60 million acres of air space (or 94,000 square miles) over Colorado and New Mexico would be given over to special forces testing and training in the use of remote-controlled flying machines. '65 Paglen's concept of 'relational geographies' can be productively amplified by conjoining it with the concept of 'relational temporalities,' that is, diachronic relations that establish critical connections across historical time and diverse geographies. Relational temporalities draw lines of connection between seemingly disparate temporal events: for example, the US state's genocidal history against Native Americans and the killing of civilians in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. In her tracking of the violent history of attempted genocide against Native Americans, Andrea Smith writes: 'the US is built on a foundation of genocide, slavery, and racism. '66 Situated in this context, what becomes apparent in the scripting of the 9/11 attacks as the worst acts of terrorism perpetrated on US soil is the effective erasure of this foundational history of state-sponsored terrorism against Native Americans. This historicidal act of whitewashing effectively clears the ground for contemporary acts of violence against the United States to be chronologically positioned as the 'first' or hierarchically ranked as the 'worst' in the nation's history. The colonial nation-state deploys, in the process, a type of Nietzschean 'active forgetting' that ensures the obliteration of prior histories of massacre and terror such as the catastrophic Trail of Tears that resulted from the Indian Removal Act of 1830. This Act enabled the forced removal of a number of Native American nations and their relocation to Oklahoma; in the process, at least four thousand Native Americans died. The Trail of Tears has been described as 'the largest instance of ethnic cleansing in American history.'67 This example of state terror is what must be occluded in order to preserve the 'innocence' of the nation so that it can subsequently claim, post 9/11, to have lost the very thing it had betrayed long ago. Jimmie Durham remarks on the repetition of this national ruse: 'The US, because of its actual guilt ... has had a nostalgia for itself since its beginnings. Even now one may read editorials almost daily about America's "loss of innocence" at some point or other, and about some time in the past when America was truly good. That self-righteousness and insistence upon innocence began, as the US began, with invasion and murder Such acts of white historicide are constituted by a double logic of taken-for-grantedness and obsessive repetition. Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, in their forensic analysis of the operations of white supremacy, articulate the seemingly contradictory dimensions of this double logic: It is the same passive apparatus of whiteness that in its mainstream guise actively forgets that it owes its existence to the killing and terrorising of those it racialises for that purpose, expelling them from the human fold in the same gesture of forgetting. It is the passivity of bad faith that tacitly accepts as 'what goes without saying' the postulates of white supremacy. And it must do so passionately since 'what goes without saying' is empty and can be held as a 'truth' only through an obsessiveness. The truth is that the truth is on the surface, flat and repetitive, just as the law is made by the uniform.1"l The it 'goes without saying' is the moment in which the very ideology of white supremacy is so naturalized as to become invisible: it is the given order of the world. Yet, in order to maintain this position of supremacy, a logic of tireless iteration must be deployed in order to secure the very everyday banality, and thus transparency, of white supremacy's daily acts of violence. For those in a position to exercise these daily rounds of state violence, their performative acts are banal because of their very quotidian repetition; yet, because their racialized targets continue to exercise, in turn, acts of resistance and outright contestation, these daily acts of state violence must be obsessively reiterated. Underpinning such acts of white supremacist violence and historicidal erasures is the official - government, media and academic - positioning of Native Americans as a 'permanent "present absence" 'that, in Smith's words, 'reinforces at every turn the conviction that Native peoples are indeed vanishing and that the conquest of Native lands is justified.'70 Precisely what gets erased in the process are the contemporary Indian wars that are being fought across the body of the US nation. These are wars that fail to register as 'wars' because the triumphant non-indigenous polity controls the ensemble of institutions - legal, military, media and so on - that fundamentally determines what will count as a 'war' in the context of the nation. In her work, Smith establishes critical points of connection between the war on terror being waged in Afghanistan or Pakistan and the issue of Indigenous sovereignty within the context of the US nation: 'it is important to understand that the war against "terror" is really an attack against Native sovereignty, and that consolidating US empire abroad is predicated on consolidating US empire within US borders. For example, the Bush administration continues to use the war on terror as an excuse to support anti-immigration policies and the militarization of the US/Mexico border. The exercise of the war on terror becomes, in other words, another way of entrenching and legitimating the usurpation of Native American sovereignty in the name of the colonial nation-state. The militarization of the US's borders has seen the Department of Homeland Security oversee the domestic transposition of military technologies such as drones- that have been used to fight the war on terror in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa- to the borders of both Mexico and Canada. Ted Poe, Congressman, 2nd District of Texas, has introduced legislation that 'mandates the Secretary of Defense transfer 10% of eligible returning equipment from Iraq to state and local law enforcement agencies for border security purposes. Operative here is what Roberto Lovato has termed 'ICE's [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] AI Qaeda-ization of immigrants and immigration policy: building a domestic security apparatus, one made possible by multi-billion contracts to military-industrial companies like Boeing, General Electric, and Halliburton. The massive scale of this militarization of US borders becomes evident in the context of a recent US government report on border security that states that 'The Department of Homeland security (DHS) has the largest enforcement air force in the world ... As of September 2011, OAM [Office of Air and Marine] had approximately 267 aircraft, 301 marine vessels, and 1,843 personnel in 70 locations primarily on the southwest, northern and southeast borders.'74 The deployment of such militarized border technologies creates a virtual fence that effectively amplifies the securitizing effects of the concrete and steel fence that is already in place in many sections of the US--Mexico border. Understood in Smith's terms, the militarization of the US border and the repulsion of attendant 'aliens' constitute a re-assertion of colonial sovereignty.