Description
9/11 has largely been represented as a moment of fundamental and irreversible change in how Americans perceive the world they live in; the onset of a new era of collective ontological insecurity. The resulting security framework structuring the war on terror reflected those anxieties in how they were or were not defined and justified to the public. One of the most ‘telling’ examples has been the government’s reticence regarding the covert drone program, one of the war’s worst kept ‘secrets’. Nonetheless, until the publication of the ‘drone handbook’ in the summer of 2016, principals in the Obama Administration had only acknowledged the program four times, even as alleged civilian death rates skyrocketed. This paper presents a discourse analysis of those four texts, asking what the spoken and unspoken in them says about US national identity, both at the height of the war and today. We argue that all four speeches problematically erase the Other from the narrative as it elevates a contradictory mix of fear and legal—hence moral—justifications to assuage the Self.