The structure of my argument divides into four main sections.
The first section attempts to situate the supposedly ‘limitless’ threat of global terrorism in a broader conceptual and historical context.
Next, I turn to the events of September 11; a potent and traumatising demonstration of the limitlessness of the terrorist threat.
From here, I turn my attentions to the geopolitical reactions to September 11, in which the United States violated the territorial integrity of Afghanistan and Iraq while reasserting the borders of the new ‘American homeland’.
Finally, I fix my sights on the original target: Guantánamo Bay. Situated in relation to the sites and events of the preceding sections, Guantanamo is seen to have been presented by the Bush administration as tantamount to the ‘kat’echon’, the restraining force.
Emerging from the confluence of Guantánamo’s colonial geography and the return of a distinctly pre-modern politics of death, a closer examination of the kat’echonics of Guantanamo Bay and, by extension, the ‘war on terror’ reveals the Bush administration’s rhetoric of containment as just that - rhetoric.
