Word: paglen
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Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World By Trevor Paglen 324 pages; Dutton...
...From Area 51 to the once-secret prisons of Afghanistan, there are certain places that the U.S. government has tried its best to erase from most maps. But as author and geographer Trevor Paglen writes early on in his book, the absence of such places - the titular blank spots -inherently inform us of their exact locations: "Secrets, in other words, often inevitably announce their own existence." Over the next 250 pages, Paglen goes on to sketch out a survey of the dark corners of the United States' national security apparatus from the early 20th century to today...
...Paglen's concern is the "black world," that parallel government bureaucracy funded by billions in taxpayer dollars, the allocation of which is never revealed. It would be misleading to take the book's subtitle at face value - the "geography" to which Paglen refers is as much metaphorical and legal as physical. (Sorry conspiracy theorists, he does not actually infiltrate any hangars at Area 51). "Blank spots on the map begat dark spaces in the law," he writes, in reference to a raft of shady government incidents from NSA wiretapping to extraordinary renditions to secret CIA missions in 1980's Latin...
...string together, and Paglen has a slight tendency towards stunts - holing up in a Las Vegas hotel in an attempt to track workers flying to and from a secret military installation, for example -and digressions, writing of the exploratory history of inner Nevada, or delving deep into the minutiae of amateur satellite hunting. That's not to suggest that those discussions aren't good reading, for they are - Paglen somehow manages to make the movements of a spy satellite riveting - but rather to say that many of his parts are more intriguing than a somewhat diffuse whole...
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