This article in the New York Times explains how the first drone strike in Pakistan happened in 2004 as an agreement between the CIA and Pakistan's military to effectively assassinate someone that Pakistan had defined as an enemy of state. CIA gained airspace, enabling them to shift from capturing to targeted killing.
That back-room bargain, described in detail for the first time in interviews with more than a dozen officials in Pakistan and the United States, is critical to understanding the origins of a covert drone war that began under the Bush administration, was embraced and expanded by President Obama, and is now the subject of fierce debate. The deal, a month after a blistering internal report about abuses in the C.I.A.’s network of secret prisons, paved the way for the C.I.A. to change its focus from capturing terrorists to killing them, and helped transform an agency that began as a cold war espionage service into a paramilitary organization.
This implies that these two architectures - incessant interrogations within secret rooms and rapid assassinations by flying robots - are interchangeable within some framework. Will we just keep vacillating between being disgusted by one or the other?
Saturday, April 6, 2013
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Follow the plywood
In a densely informative pair of articles
OPERATION DELIRIUM
in the New Yorker, this caught my eye:In May, 1962, while testing BZ’s effect on soldier performance, Ketchum oversaw the construction of an entire Hollywood-style set in the form of a makeshift communications outpost. The plan was to confine four soldiers to the outpost for three days... Technicians built a small room out of plywood. Cots and a table were brought in, and a handheld radio and switchboard were positioned against the green walls. To help achieve realism, Ketchum added a large switch with a sign that warned “Danger—Do Not Touch.” Cameras were installed behind wall panels. “It was a nervy operation, no matter how you looked at it,” Ketchum wrote. “Even with an inch of padding on the walls and a two-inch foam rubber carpet to minimize the chance of injury. ”
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/12/17/121217fa_fact_khatchadourian#ixzz2IijpWys8Do the tactics of Black Sites begin with the military's unhinged experiments with LSD? This would fit my (admittedly vague) vague hypothesis that the hyper- control, banality, and reproducibility of the space enables its escape from political and social boundaries, from everything we consider civilized or modern.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
presenting "global/local: black sites and other research" at Studio X
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Monday, August 29, 2011
BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE
Mitch McEwen - announcement -
seeking: venue partners, performance artists, transportation sponsors
Please forward to performance artists who may be interested to engage the programming of a space designed to operate outside of lawful control, yet highly formal and geared toward gathering information.
BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE
How does architecture engage today's most complex ethical dilemmas in America - the politics of information, the normalization of long-term mechanized war, the abstractness of foreign bodies, the intersection of legal rights and spatial territory? The BLACK SITE project investigates these ethical questions within terms germane to contemporary architecture - invoking strategies shared with contemporary military practice, including: pop-up sites, temporary construction, programmatic fluidity, embedded media, and low-cost materials.
More than two years after President Obama declared the end to the practice of secret CIA holding cells, known as "black sites," the practices of rendition and interrogation remain as secret and nebulous as ever. Indeed, as of this summer, the CIA appears to be operating a network of black sites in Mogadishu, Somalia, despite President Obama's declaration and in continuous defiance of the Writ of Habeas Corpus and the Geneva Conventions.
The culmination of a trilogy of installations, BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE consists of an elegant black tie event produced within a one-to-one scale spatial reenactment of a CIA black site. The space of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE selectively reproduces architectural technologies of actual black site facilities, including multi-media elements that filter and emit white noise, rap and other music, as based upon reporting of C.I.A. detainment practices. Microphones are fed into sound exciters and surface transducers that turn wall and furniture elements into speakers. Using components often deployed in video game production of 'virtual' experience, multiple levels of transduction create a range of output from audio to tactile effects.
Visitors will meet at a pre-designated location to be escorted to (and from) the undisclosed secret site of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE. The location of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE will be either disguised within a known institution or sited outside of traditional exhibition venues. One to three BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE events will take place between the dates of Thursday, November 3, 2011 and Monday, November 21, 2011. The location will be indistinguishable to visitors and announced only following the dismantling of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE.
To get involved or register as a visitor, please email blacksite@thaconglomerate.com
BLACK SITE #2, installation photo, Old Police Station gallery, 2010, London, UK
BLACK SITE #2, installation detail, Old Police Station gallery, 2010, London, UK
BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE is enabled by generous funding from the New York State Council on the Arts
seeking: venue partners, performance artists, transportation sponsors
Please forward to performance artists who may be interested to engage the programming of a space designed to operate outside of lawful control, yet highly formal and geared toward gathering information.
BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE
How does architecture engage today's most complex ethical dilemmas in America - the politics of information, the normalization of long-term mechanized war, the abstractness of foreign bodies, the intersection of legal rights and spatial territory? The BLACK SITE project investigates these ethical questions within terms germane to contemporary architecture - invoking strategies shared with contemporary military practice, including: pop-up sites, temporary construction, programmatic fluidity, embedded media, and low-cost materials.
More than two years after President Obama declared the end to the practice of secret CIA holding cells, known as "black sites," the practices of rendition and interrogation remain as secret and nebulous as ever. Indeed, as of this summer, the CIA appears to be operating a network of black sites in Mogadishu, Somalia, despite President Obama's declaration and in continuous defiance of the Writ of Habeas Corpus and the Geneva Conventions.
The culmination of a trilogy of installations, BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE consists of an elegant black tie event produced within a one-to-one scale spatial reenactment of a CIA black site. The space of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE selectively reproduces architectural technologies of actual black site facilities, including multi-media elements that filter and emit white noise, rap and other music, as based upon reporting of C.I.A. detainment practices. Microphones are fed into sound exciters and surface transducers that turn wall and furniture elements into speakers. Using components often deployed in video game production of 'virtual' experience, multiple levels of transduction create a range of output from audio to tactile effects.
Visitors will meet at a pre-designated location to be escorted to (and from) the undisclosed secret site of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE. The location of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE will be either disguised within a known institution or sited outside of traditional exhibition venues. One to three BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE events will take place between the dates of Thursday, November 3, 2011 and Monday, November 21, 2011. The location will be indistinguishable to visitors and announced only following the dismantling of BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE.
To get involved or register as a visitor, please email blacksite@thaconglomerate.com
BLACK SITE #2, installation photo, Old Police Station gallery, 2010, London, UK
BLACK SITE #2, installation detail, Old Police Station gallery, 2010, London, UK
BLACK SITE | BLACK TIE is enabled by generous funding from the New York State Council on the Arts
About Mitch McEwen
Mitch McEwen, Principal of A. Conglomerate, is a recipient of the The New York State Council on the Arts 2010 Independent Projects awards for Architecture, Planning and Design. The Akademie Schloss Solitude has granted her a residency fellowship in architecture for 2012-2013. McEwen's work evolves from concepts and provocations within a social field. In her work performance often becomes an act of architectural interpretation. She is profiled in the September 2011 issue of ARTnews. Her architectural work has been published in Architectural Record and the New York Times, and her writing in African-American studies has been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (IRAAS, Columbia University, 2007, 2009). Since founding SUPERFRONT in January 2008, she has curated more than fifteen exhibits and published 4 exhibition catalogues. In 2006, she was invited to join the adjunct faculty of Columbia GSAPP as Adjunct Assistant Professor to create a new cross-disciplinary course for urban planners and urban designers. She holds an M.Arch from Columbia GSAPP and A.B. from Harvard.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia, excerpts from Jeremy Scahill
This article appeared in the August 1-8, 2011 edition of The Nation. Below are excerpts that focus on the more architectural information, including site and egress.
Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access....
According to former detainees, the underground prison, which is staffed by Somali guards, consists of a long corridor lined with filthy small cells infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes. One said that when he arrived in February, he saw two white men wearing military boots, combat trousers, gray tucked-in shirts and black sunglasses. The former prisoners described the cells as windowless and the air thick, moist and disgusting....
A Somali who was arrested in Mogadishu and taken to the prison told The Nation that he was held in a windowless underground cell. Among the prisoners he met during his time there was a man who held a Western passport (he declined to identify the man’s nationality). Some of the prisoners told him they were picked up in Nairobi and rendered on small aircraft to Mogadishu, where they were handed over to Somali intelligence agents....
According to the former fellow prisoner, Hassan told him that his captors took him to Wilson Airport: “‘They put a bag on my head, Guantánamo style. They tied my hands behind my back and put me on a plane. In the early hours we landed in Mogadishu. The way I realized I was in Mogadishu was because of the smell of the sea—the runway is just next to the seashore....
Throughout the areas AMISOM has retaken is a honeycomb of underground tunnels once used by Shabab fighters to move from building to building. By some accounts, the tunnels stretch continuously for miles. Leftover food, blankets and ammo cartridges lay scattered near “pop-up” positions once used by Shabab snipers and guarded by sandbags—all that remain of guerrilla warfare positions.
Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. Adjacent to the compound are eight large metal hangars, and the CIA has its own aircraft at the airport. The site, which airport officials and Somali intelligence sources say was completed four months ago, is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access....
According to former detainees, the underground prison, which is staffed by Somali guards, consists of a long corridor lined with filthy small cells infested with bedbugs and mosquitoes. One said that when he arrived in February, he saw two white men wearing military boots, combat trousers, gray tucked-in shirts and black sunglasses. The former prisoners described the cells as windowless and the air thick, moist and disgusting....
A Somali who was arrested in Mogadishu and taken to the prison told The Nation that he was held in a windowless underground cell. Among the prisoners he met during his time there was a man who held a Western passport (he declined to identify the man’s nationality). Some of the prisoners told him they were picked up in Nairobi and rendered on small aircraft to Mogadishu, where they were handed over to Somali intelligence agents....
According to the former fellow prisoner, Hassan told him that his captors took him to Wilson Airport: “‘They put a bag on my head, Guantánamo style. They tied my hands behind my back and put me on a plane. In the early hours we landed in Mogadishu. The way I realized I was in Mogadishu was because of the smell of the sea—the runway is just next to the seashore....
Throughout the areas AMISOM has retaken is a honeycomb of underground tunnels once used by Shabab fighters to move from building to building. By some accounts, the tunnels stretch continuously for miles. Leftover food, blankets and ammo cartridges lay scattered near “pop-up” positions once used by Shabab snipers and guarded by sandbags—all that remain of guerrilla warfare positions.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Rachel Maddow on black sites
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
New revelations on CIA Black Sites
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/07/am-i-a-torturer/
Wired.com:: You’re maybe the only CIA officer to publicly describe a “black site” prison, your Hotel California. What was it like to be inside a place completely off the books from any legal accountability? Did it make you feel like you could act with impunity? How did you restrain yourself?
Carle: No, I never, never felt like I could or should act with impunity. No one I know felt that way. We all felt we were involved in an extraordinary, sensitive operation that required very careful behavior. What was acceptable was often unclear, despite the formal guidance that eventually was developed.
“How did I restrain myself” implies perhaps that I was inclined to act in unrestrained ways. I never, ever was; nor were, in my experience, my colleagues. From literally the first second I was briefed on the operation, I was acutely aware that I would have to weigh every step I took, and decide what was morally, legally acceptable. There was never the slightest thought that I or anyone could act with impunity. We were acting clandestinely; but never beyond obligations to act correctly and honorably. The dilemma comes in identifying where those lines are, in a situation in which much was murky.
Wired.com:: You’re maybe the only CIA officer to publicly describe a “black site” prison, your Hotel California. What was it like to be inside a place completely off the books from any legal accountability? Did it make you feel like you could act with impunity? How did you restrain yourself?
Carle: No, I never, never felt like I could or should act with impunity. No one I know felt that way. We all felt we were involved in an extraordinary, sensitive operation that required very careful behavior. What was acceptable was often unclear, despite the formal guidance that eventually was developed.
“How did I restrain myself” implies perhaps that I was inclined to act in unrestrained ways. I never, ever was; nor were, in my experience, my colleagues. From literally the first second I was briefed on the operation, I was acutely aware that I would have to weigh every step I took, and decide what was morally, legally acceptable. There was never the slightest thought that I or anyone could act with impunity. We were acting clandestinely; but never beyond obligations to act correctly and honorably. The dilemma comes in identifying where those lines are, in a situation in which much was murky.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Some Photos of BLACK SITE #2
Deptford X Festival, Old Police Station, BLACK SITE #2 commissioned by curator Anthony Gross
Thursday, September 23, 2010
20 Commands - BLACK SITE #2
[BLACK SITE #2 commands from Chloe Bass, Brooklyn-based performance artist. b. 1984 New York, NY]
Think about your body. Make it smaller. Smaller again. Make it still smaller.
Take yourself out of yourself.
Watch the person to your right.
Find a corner. Fit in.
Become invisible.
Hold your breath for 30 seconds. Count.
Drop to your knees.
Overhear a conversation.
Shut off the voice in your head.
Blend in.
Apologize.
Confess.
Pray.
Find a home.
Attack.
Accept attack.
Follow the rules.
Stop making exceptions.
Get in line.
Forget your name.
Think about your body. Make it smaller. Smaller again. Make it still smaller.
Take yourself out of yourself.
Watch the person to your right.
Find a corner. Fit in.
Become invisible.
Hold your breath for 30 seconds. Count.
Drop to your knees.
Overhear a conversation.
Shut off the voice in your head.
Blend in.
Apologize.
Confess.
Pray.
Find a home.
Attack.
Accept attack.
Follow the rules.
Stop making exceptions.
Get in line.
Forget your name.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Monday, September 20, 2010
A Window Into C.I.A.’s Embrace of Secret Jails | Published: August 12, 2009
WASHINGTON — In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists.
Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money — whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment.
... With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells.
... The cells were constructed with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften the impact of being slammed into the wall.
Afghans Detail Detention in ‘Black Jail’ at U.S. Base | Published: November 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/world/asia/29bagram.html
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: November 28, 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.
The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day
By ALISSA J. RUBIN
Published: November 28, 2009
KABUL, Afghanistan — An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.
The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day
Sunday, September 19, 2010
BLACK SITE #2
2 microphones hang from ceiling, output audio into walls and mattress, with bucket nearby.
War on Terror
The installation references both the format of competitive MCing and techniques deployed against 'enemy combatants' in the War on Terror, in order to investigate the overlap of battle and play at the scale of individual bodies.
BLACK SITE #2
"BLACK SITE #2"
Inspired by the CIA's documented use of rap music as an element of sleep depravation torture, BLACK SITE #2 consists of a multi-media installation that hybridizes ad hoc detention with ad hoc performance. Two microphones are fed into sound exciters and surface transducers that turn wall and furniture elements into speakers. Visitors are invited to use the microphones to engage in a competition, a game, or any form of performance. Using components often deployed in video game production of 'virtual' experience, multiple levels of transduction create a range of output from audio to tactile effects. The installation references both the format of competitive MCing and techniques deployed against 'enemy combatants' in the War on Terror, in order to investigate the overlap of battle and play at the scale of individual bodies. This involves, of course, a play on the word black - which here references both the signification of Black identity invoked by rap music and the CIA terminology for a specific network of facilities. This hybridization of space for cultural production and militarized detention questions the role of language and performance in the interplay between normative civil society and military operations and technology.
The BLACK SITE SERIES project
The BLACK SITE SERIES project is both an architectural research endeavor and a series of full-scale prototypes focused on sound, surveillance, displacement and the body. Based upon public-record evidence gathered in "War on Terror" depositions and trials, the project begins with an interpretation of CIA rendition cells at one-to-one scale. Hence the title: the BLACK SITE SERIES. The project involves many levels of play on the word black - referencing both the signification of Black identity, as well as the CIA terminology for a specific network of facilities. Ultimately, the project deploys architecture to investigate the role of language and performance in the interplay between normative civil society and military operations and technology.
I have begun developing the BLACK SITE SERIES this summer as two gallery installations and recently been awarded a New York State Council of the Arts Independent Project grant for further research, prototyoping and installations. The first BLACK SITE #1, built in Los Angeles at SUPERFRONT LA, emphasized the specifics of placement and geographic alignment. The second installation, BLACK SITE #2, inspired by the CIA's documented use of rap music as an element of sleep deprivation torture, consists of a multi-media installation that hybridizes ad hoc detention with ad hoc performance. Two microphones are fed into sound exciters and surface transducers that turn wall and furniture elements into speakers. That prototype has been commissioned for installation in a curated exhibit at the Old Police Station gallery for the Deptford X festival in London this September.
I have begun developing the BLACK SITE SERIES this summer as two gallery installations and recently been awarded a New York State Council of the Arts Independent Project grant for further research, prototyoping and installations. The first BLACK SITE #1, built in Los Angeles at SUPERFRONT LA, emphasized the specifics of placement and geographic alignment. The second installation, BLACK SITE #2, inspired by the CIA's documented use of rap music as an element of sleep deprivation torture, consists of a multi-media installation that hybridizes ad hoc detention with ad hoc performance. Two microphones are fed into sound exciters and surface transducers that turn wall and furniture elements into speakers. That prototype has been commissioned for installation in a curated exhibit at the Old Police Station gallery for the Deptford X festival in London this September.
BLACK SITE #1 - Los Angeles
" – Would anyone like to have a little look down into the secret of how ideals are fabricated on this earth? Who has enough pluck? . . . Come on! Here we have a clear glimpse into this dark workshop." -Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality
Elements of a C.I.A. interrogation facility are constructed at one-to-one scale. Referencing secret sites of U.S. military detention, the work incorporates testimony of deposition statements from detainees held in the “War on Terror”. The work reproduces the multi-sensory experience of the facility typology analyzed, including multimedia elements such as white noise and rap music, as based upon evidence gathered of actual C.I.A. detainment practices.
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