Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Trevor Paglen, Ph.D., has published numerous research papers in academic journals and his writing has appeared in The Village Voice and The San Francisco Bay Guardian. He is the author of I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me and Torture Taxi. He is also an internationally recognized artist who exhibits frequently in major galleries and museums around the world. He lives in Berkeley, California.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Chapter 1 - Facts on the Ground

Chapter 2 - A Guy in the Classified World

Chapter 3 - Unexplored Territory

Chapter 4 - Wastelands

Chapter 5 - Classified Résumés

Chapter 6 - Fiat Lux

Chapter 7 - The Other Night Sky

Chapter 8 - The Observer Effect

Chapter 9 - Blank Spots in the Law

Chapter 10 - The Precedent

Chapter 11 - Money Behind Mirrored Walls

Chapter 12 - Nonfunding the Black World

Chapter 13 - Plains of Death

Chapter 14 - Anything You Need Anywhere

Chapter 15 - Bobs

Chapter 16 - Screaming Their Heads Off

Epilogue

NOTES

Acknowledgements

INDEX

DUTTON
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Map on pages viii-ix created by Darin Jensen. Photo on page 7: courtesy of the USGS; page 80: courtesy of the Department of Energy; page 152: courtesy of the USAF; page 168: courtesy of National Parks Service; page 186: courtesy of the Library of Congress. All other photos courtesy of the author.

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

eISBN : 978-1-101-01149-2

1. Military bases—United States. 2. Intelligence service—United States. 3. Defense information,
Classified—United States. 4. Military bases, American. I. Title.
UA26.A2P2716 2009
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Prologue

“We need to find an old man,” says Maiwand. We’re standing on a street corner in downtown Kabul. The traffic around us is a tempest of battered 1970s Toyotas occasionally punctuated by a U.N. Land Cruiser or an American Suburban. We’re trying to find a taxi driver who knows the back road to Bagram, a road that has been so dangerous for so long that driving on it would have been unthinkable until recently. We need to find someone who remembers the route from before the Soviet invasion in 1979. An old man.

Eventually we find a driver who knows the road and wants $15 to make the trip, a week’s salary for someone lucky enough to have a steady job outside the opium business. We get into the man’s beat-up Toyota wagon and bounce toward Kabul’s outskirts. At the traffic circle near the military’s heavily fortified Kabul Compound around the corner from the bunker-like American embassy, we see a two-story-high paint-chipped and weathered sign instructing locals to turn in any terrorists they may know.

Kabul itself is occupied by a gaggle of American military units, private military contractors, European troops from the International Security Forces, United Nations development outfits, and other assorted nongovernmental organizations, but their trappings fade away as our cab drives northeast past the airport toward the back road to Bagram. Once we’re outside town, houses give way to sprawling junkyards erected Mad Max-style on the Afghan plains. Guard towers protect the compounds’ precious scrap metal and junk. Solitary furnaces from distant brick factories lace the air with black smoke. A few oversized pickup trucks with homemade turquoise-blue paint jobs adorned with intricate gold and red markings ramble past, their backs overladen with burlap sacks bearing food from Afghanistan’s agrarian bread-basket to the north.

After ten dusty miles, the walls of a compound rise in the distance, and we come to an old-world traffic jam: an elderly shepherd wearing baggy Afghan garb herding a flock of goats across the battered road. The man turns around to look at us. He’s wearing a baseball hat. Unusual attire for a traditional Afghan, to say the least. Emblazoned on his cap are the same initials I’d seen printed on identity cards hanging from the necks of Bagram-bound contractors in Dubai. KBR: Kellogg Brown and Root, the construction firm that had until recently been a subsidiary of Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old company.

And there it is in the distance. The top of the crumbling old brick factory once known as the Hecht-hochtief, which found new purpose as one of the first black sites of the war on terror’s geography. A secret prison called the Salt Pit, built shortly after September 11 as the Northern Alliance, the CIA, and American Special Forces fanned though Afghanistan. Like so many other secret places, it had been built as a “temporary” facility but stayed open long after the initial invasion was complete, eventually holding scores of the CIA’s “ghost” prisoners who’d been “rendered” from all over the world. When the CIA abducted a man named Khaled El-Masri from Macedonia and brought him here, his black-clad interrogators told him that he “was in Afghanistan, where there are no laws . . . ‘We can do with you whatever we want.’ ”

What was once a single, crumbling building was now an entire complex spanning dozens of acres and surrounded by high brick walls and a barbed wire fence. Outside the walled gates was another wind-blasted and paint-chipped sign in Dari and English: NO PHOTOGRAPHY. I start snapping pictures.

Black SUVs pull out from the far side of the compound, a tell-tale sign of some kind of “special” American unit: CIA, Special...