Blank Spots on the Map by Trevor Paglen

Blank Spots on the Map by Trevor Paglen

Author:Trevor Paglen [Paglen, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101011492
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2009-01-16T00:00:00+00:00


From a plane crash in 1947, to the London Fog at Groom Lake, to more contemporary controversies surrounding everything from extraordinary rendition to NSA wiretapping, the state secrets privilege proliferated in tandem with the black world itself. Blank spots on maps begat dark spaces in the law.

On March 3, 2007, Khaled El-Masri wrote the words “I Am Not a State Secret” on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times. El-Masri, a Lebanese-born German citizen, had been kidnapped by the CIA in Skopje, Macedonia, and taken to the agency’s Salt Pit prison on Kabul’s outskirts, where he was subjected to months of incommunicado detention. Arriving back home outside Munich after his long ordeal, no one would believe his story, but when human rights researchers, lawyers, and journalists started following up the details he provided, his story started to look true. Working with the ACLU, the former “ghost detainee” filed a lawsuit entitled El-Masri v. Tenet and looked forward to his day in court.

It never came.

“The claims and defenses pertinent to this lawsuit would require the CIA to admit or deny the existence of a clandestine CIA activity,” wrote the lawyers at Alberto Gonzales’s Justice Department, citing the Reynolds and Kasza precedents:



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