The conventional wisdom among US foreign policy makers is that drones enable precise strikes, and therefore limit collateral damage. In contrast, critics point out that many civilian casualties have ensued, and they variously cite poor intelligence and imprecision of the strikes as reasons for this. Critics have also raised concerns that the US and its allies are. As such, some have questioned whether academic engagement with the legal questions surrounding targeted killings amount to collusion with state attempts to legitimise human rights violations. The paper will argue that by conceptualising the targeted killings programme as a form of state terrorism, we are better equipped to provide a critical analysis of the drones programme within the context of a long history of violence and terrorism which has underpinned the imperial and neo-imperial projects of the UK and US. The paper will then argue that there are important similarities between the targeted killings programme, and previous UK and US counterinsurgency operations, including prior uses of air power, and operations involving the internment of terror suspects, and the targeting of specific individuals for interrogation and torture or disappearance. Common to these programmes is that they are forms of policing aimed at crushing rebellions, stifling disorder and constructing or maintaining particular political economies, through terror. Also common to these programmes are the attempts made either to conceal illicit actions, or in the event they are exposed, to shroud them in a veil of legitimacy. The paper concludes by offering some brief reflections on why we should not abandon the quest to resolve the thorny legal questions around the targeted killings programme. Department of Defense position that they would uphold the anti-torture norm, it becomes clear why the Bush administration went to great lengths to try and secure legal justifications from the Department of Justice, both for the RDI programme and for its treatment of prisoners detained in US Department of Defense facilities, including in Guantánamo Bay. These efforts were of course highly secretive, and involved the exchange of a whole series of memos between the White House, CIA and Department of Defense, which are now declassified and have been extensively analysed (SSCI 2014; Greenberg and Dratel 2005; Blakeley 2011, 544-61; Sands 2008). The explicit aim of these endeavours was to try and shield those involved in rendition, secret detention and torture from prosecution, in other words, evading any accountability. Key to this was the attempt to put in place a legal architecture justifying their actions as somehow short of torture, hence the use of the to organ failure it did not count as torture, and the attempt to categorise those targeted as both guilty of terrorism, despite the absence of any legitimate due process to test that, and as somehow inhuman and therefore worthy of this treatment (