ACLU: CIA’s Linguistic Somersault Takes to the Sky

[marmar]

EXISTENCE OR NONEXISTENCE: CIA’s Linguistic Somersault Takes to the Sky

06/20/2014
By David Birkin at 12:05pm


This past Memorial Day weekend, New Yorkers who happened to look up may have seen the words EXISTENCE OR NONEXISTENCE appear across the skyline in synchronized bursts of white smoke.

The seemingly spontaneous event was a project of mine called Severe Clear. It was inspired by a letter the CIA sent the ACLU rejecting their Freedom of Information Act request for documents relating to the U.S. government’s classified drone program. The letter reiterates the now familiar Glomar response, stating that the agency can “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence” of records responsive to the request.

For years, the American Civil Liberties Union has been fighting in court to try to force the government to acknowledge its secret drone program. The use of drones by the Pentagon is official and constitutes a key component in the military’s increasingly automated arsenal. But their use by the CIA for the purposes of targeted assassination remains unofficial, despite widespread reporting in the press as a result of White House-sanctioned leaks. This classified program remains unconstrained by judicial or congressional oversight, even in such extreme cases as the targeting of American citizens.

My interest is in the wording of the CIA's rejection letter – a linguistic somersault that takes legislative precision and turns it into a kind of esoteric, existential rhetoric. Like a line from Kafka composed in bureaucratic prose, it tells us, in the most precise terms, nothing, except that the absence of affirmation does not imply it exists. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/existence-or-nonexistence-cias-linguistic-somersault-takes-sky