words words wordswor dswor dsrow drsow drows drowse owze zzz

Violation and distortion of law is a recurring theme in Paglen - he documents how the constitution, the state secrets privilege, the Hughes-Ryan Act, and many other documents and precedents have been reinterpreted, rewritten, and outright ignored in the interest of perpetuating and expanding the black world. Reading these accounts, one is led to the dispiriting conclusion that the law in this country is just so many words, actionable only when those with the money and guns find it convenient.

It is striking, then, to note the black world's masturbatory fascination with self-justifying documents and signatures, and the degree of power it allows its own words to hold over its actions. Paglen notes that several pieces of legislation that somehow 'legitimize' black world practices while themselves remaining secret, sometimes even to the legislators who pass them. This performative circularity, while suggestive, is inconclusive - it could easily be seen as establishing something to point to for the benefit of the outside world, rather than having any real significance to the actors behind the scenes.

The story of George Tenet's "Going to War" proposal, on the other hand, is astoundingly, blatantly, circularly and internally self-hosting and self-legitimizing. It appears to have been a completely informal document, its existence motivated by the desire for its existence, a broad vision of a future in which the CIA is granted "exceptional authorities" penned by - guess who? - the director of the CIA. There were no legal proceedings undertaken to determine whether such exception-making was appropriate, no vetting of the would-be authorities. But they wrote it down on a piece of paper, and then Bush put his name on it - a legally empty gesture, as far as I'm aware - and then, suddenly noticing that they appeared to be holding an official looking document with the president's name on it, they suddenly became "supercharged with newfound life and purpose" (250) and started gallivanting about kidnapping and torturing people.

Paglen does not point at this phenomenon directly, but his language is telling. Describing the CIA's exhilaration at the prospect of gaining the "extraordinary powers" they made up for themselves, he writes that they "would be able to" perform extraordinary rendition, and "would now be able to kill," as though the signing of a piece of paper (which as far as the public is concerned could just as well not exist, being classified) would in fact create in them the ability to do these things where there was none before.

Looking at the black world's relationship to language from both angles - the words they ignore and the words they create - makes it clear that they do not view legal language merely as an irrelevant annoyance to be brushed aside at will, as one might begin to assume from the account of United States v. Reynolds. Rather, it is.... uh.... something else. More complicated. That talking about it in section is a good idea.

In particular though, where does power come form in a text, for black world organizers and operatives? Why are some words magically performative and some, even those with a huge amount of cultural weight behind them, barely given even a first glance? Is there an internal distinction between laws the intelligence community works to have rewritten in their own image and those they simply ignore?

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While the use of the term 'black world' seems entirely free of any racial connotations, it seems it might become slightly more problematic when it is inverted: at several points in Blank Spots, Paglen refers to the entirety of the non-classified universe as the 'white world',
a phrase which is at once utterly natural, and, suddenly, just over the edge of noticeably problematic. This is surely because the racist interpretation of it is a coherent worldview: one can imagine positing that all trustworthy, forthright human interaction is racially 'white' (and in fact the word was once used in exactly that sense: "that's very white of you," &c.), while on the other hand the hypothetically racist notion that all CIA operatives are black is simply nonsense; the (my?) brain rejects that interpretation before the connection can start to seem more meaningful than it does when I talk about the black jeans I'm wearing or the black on white words I'm typing.

I don't know if that means anything. It's an interesting but completely irrelevant question whether one 'should' take considerations like this into account before making phraseology decisions.