Images Of The Everywhere War

Images of the Everywhere War

WITNESS

Trevor Paglen

Four years into the Obama administration, the signature institutions and covert actions of the war we used to call the "war on terror" have not gone away. From the CIA's ongoing renditions program to the reconvened military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay, the paradigmatic institutions of the George W. Bush administration's extra-legal wars have now become so entrenched in U.S. political life that they are hardly noticed. The Obama administration has added its own signature covert surveillance, sabotage, and assassination programs to the lexicon: the ongoing drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere; the cybernetic wars fought with weaponized software called Stuxnet, Flame, and Duqu; the hunt-and-kill missions of the Joint Special Operations Command’s secret commando units, active in Pakistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Nigeria, and other countries with which the United States is officially not at war.

The expansion and formalization of what geographer Derek Gregory calls the “Everywhere War” comes with radical new claims of executive power, the creation of secret laws, and a brutal campaign against whistleblowers, leakers, and critics. The Obama administration has claimed the right to assassinate U.S. citizens at will (as they did with Anwar al-Awlaki and his sixteen-year-old son, Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki), and has developed a classified interpretation of the Patriot Act that allows FBI dragnet surveillance of electronic data, including emails, phone records, bank statements, geolocation data, and much more. Further, the administration has waged an unprecedented campaign against informers, using a onceobscure World War I anti-spying law—the 1917 Espionage Act—to prosecute critics such as National Security Agency whistleblower Thomas Drake and CIA officer-turned-critic John Kiriakou. This administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers and leakers in its first three years than all previous administrations combined. As Aaron David Miller put it in an article for Foreign Policy. “Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.”

Yet much of this remains unseen. What could the photography of the Everywhere War look like? What kinds of images can show a war that is not characterized by images of carpet bombing and napalmed children, but by the rubble aftermath of a remote-controlled robot assassination in a place where no journalist can go? A war in which images of tortured prisoners in military dungeons are replaced by the blank void of a secret take-noprisoners raid? A war of computer codes and secret memos? A war that is everywhere and yet largely invisible? •