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Blank Spots on the Map
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Blank Spots on the Map Hardback - 2009

by Paglen, Trevor

Blank Spots on the Map is an expose of an empire that continues to grow every year and which, officially, it isn't even there. It is the adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a young geographer's road trip through the underworld of U.S. military and C.I.A. 'black ops' sites. This is a shadow nation of state secrets: clandestine military bases, ultra-secret black sites, classified factories, hidden laboratories, and top-secret agencies making up what defense and intelligence insiders themselves call the 'black world.' Run by an amorphous group of government agencies and private companies, this empire's ever expanding budget dwarfs that of many good sized countries, yet it denies its own existence.

Author Trevor Paglen is a scholar in geography, an artist, and a provocateur. His research into areas that officially don't exist leads him on a globe-trotting investigation into a vast, undemocratic, and uncontrolled black empire the unmarked blank areas whether you are looking at Google Earth or a U.S. Geological Survey map. Paglen knocks on the doors of CIA prisons, stakes out the Groom Lake covert air base in Nevada from a mountaintop 30 miles away, observes classified spacecraft in the night sky with amateur astronomers, and dissects the Defense Department's multibillion dollar black budget. Traveling to the Middle East, Central America, and even around our nation's capital and its surrounding suburbs, he interviews the people who live on the edges of these blank spots.

Paglen visits the widow of Walter Kazra, who, while working construction at Groom Lake, was poisoned by the toxic garbage pits there. The U. S. Air Force defense to his estate's suit? The base does not exist. The U. S. Supreme Court declined to review the case. Whether Paglen reports from a hotel room in Vegas, Washington D. C. suburbs, secret prisons in Kabul, buried CIA aircraft in Honduras, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, he is impassioned, rigorous, relentless and eye-opening. This is a human, vivid, and telling portrait of a ballooning national mistake.


From the publisher

"Blank Spots on the Map" is an expose of an empire that continues to grow every year?and which, officially, it isn?t even there. It is the adventurous, insightful, and often chilling story of a young geographer's road trip through the underworld of U.S. military and C.I.A. ?black ops? sites. This is a shadow nation of state secrets: clandestine military bases, ultra-secret black sites, classified factories, hidden laboratories, and top-secret agencies making up what defense and intelligence insiders themselves call the ?black world.? Run by an amorphous group of government agencies and private companies, this empire's ever expanding budget dwarfs that of many good sized countries, yet it denies its own existence.
Author Trevor Paglen is a scholar in geography, an artist, and a provocateur. His research into areas that officially don?t exist leads him on a globe-trotting investigation into a vast, undemocratic, and uncontrolled black empire?the unmarked blank areas whether you are looking at Google Earth or a U.S. Geological Survey map. Paglen knocks on the doors of CIA prisons, stakes out the Groom Lake covert air base in Nevada from a mountaintop 30 miles away, observes classified spacecraft in the night sky with amateur astronomers, and dissects the Defense Department's multibillion dollar black budget. Traveling to the Middle East, Central America, and even around our nation's capital and its surrounding suburbs, he interviews the people who live on the edges of these blank spots. Paglen visits the widow of Walter Kazra, who, while working construction at Groom Lake, was poisoned by the toxic garbage pits there. The U. S. Air Force defense to his estate's suit? The base does not exist. The U. S. Supreme Court declined to review the case. Whether Paglen reports from a hotel room in Vegas, Washington D. C. suburbs, secret prisons in Kabul, buried CIA aircraft in Honduras, or a trailer in Shoshone Indian territory, he is impassioned, rigorous, relentless?and eye-opening. This is a human, vivid, and telling portrait of a ballooning national mistake.

Details

  • Title Blank Spots on the Map
  • Author Paglen, Trevor
  • Binding Hardback
  • Edition First Edition
  • Pages 336
  • Language EN
  • Publisher Dutton Adult, New York
  • Date 2009-02-05
  • ISBN 9780525951018

Media reviews

'Trevor Paglen set out to map the darkest corners of the U. S. national security apparatus. He's done that and more. The result is a fascinating, deeply troubling, and absolutely essential book.'
Andrew J. Bacevich, professor in international relations at Boston University, retired colonel in the US Army, and author of The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism

'Trevor Paglen gets into the black heart of America's black sites. There is no better guide to this great American mystery. What goes on inside these bases will determine the future of warfare and who we are for the rest of the century.'
Robert Baer, former case officer at the CIA and author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism

'Blank Spots is an important, well-researched, and insightful expose that opens a window into the black world of secret operations. Paglen's conclusion that our own history, in large part, has become a state secret' is both a warning and a call to arms. It is time to heed the warning and take up arms.'
John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman

'A chillingly literal tour de force. Paglen doesn't so much fill in the blanks as trace their outlines and give their shifting shapes a density that says as much about the future of democracy as it does about the dismal confines of the black world.'
Derek Gregory, Professor of Geography, University of British Columbia

'Living among us is an entire shadow industry of secret careers, unmarked flights, and razor-wired compounds evoking stereotyped images of the Cold-War Soviet Union. In what is still the world's most open society, Paglen adroitly exposes this dark geography. His book is fascinating and necessary.'

Laurence Smith, Professor of Geography, University of California Los Angeles

'Some of the worst crimes in the American landscape are hiding in plain sight, and nobody has ever pursued them more thoroughly or explained them more chillingly and engagingly than Trevor Paglen. What he is doing is important, fascinating, and groundbreaking.'
Rebecca Solnit, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner and author of Wanderlust

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

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