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Summary: FOIA and the NSC 'black box'
Douglas Cox and Ramzi Kassem
The government currently treats the entire National Security Council
(NSC) and National Security Staff (NSS) interagency structure as exempt
from the disclosure requirements of the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) as well as the record keeping requirements of the Federal Records
Act (FRA). Instead the government treats all NSC/NSS records as subject
only to the significantly less stringent, and almost unenforceable,
Presidential Records Act (PRA). This means that NSC/NSS targeting
decisions take place within a "black box" where limited documentation
requirements allow, if not encourage, "no notes" policies and any
records created can be destroyed at the President's sole discretion. The
situation has only worsened given reporting that the NSC's role has
even expanded in recent years. Indeed, the NSC has taken over aspects of
the drone killing process that had been previously led by
self-described "agencies," and therefore would have been subject to the
FOIA and the FRA. Whether viewed as a "bureaucratic power grab" or a
responsible removal of targeting decisions from those who "pull the
trigger," the expansion of NSC control has further shrouded the process
in secrecy and undermined accountability. The current limited
documentation requirements for the NSC's involvement in the killings of
US citizens and others outside of recognized battlefields has crucial
implications for transparency and executive branch accountability. As we
will argue, greater documentation and disclosure requirements are
needed for the NSC to ensure accountability to Congress, the public, and
history.
How to do things with(out) words
Joshua Craze
I’ve spent many years reading documents that arrive in my inbox, or my
mailbox, covered with redactions. I read them like a detective, looking
for the traces with which I can tell stories of money and
disappearances. Recently though, I have begun to think I’ve been missing
something—maybe, rather than reading these documents for what they
hide, for what isn’t redacted, I should be reading the black spaces.
Take this page, from a CIA document. Nothing in the legal framework that
governs redaction can explain its form, which is reminiscent of 1970s
American conceptual poetry. As I began to study the aesthetics of
redaction, I saw that it has a grammar. In some texts, the verbs vanish:
subjects do unmentionable things to suspects, who then miraculously
confess. In other texts, there are redacted subjects waterboarding
redacted suspects. Only the action remains. In the Office of Legal
Counsel’s report into the torture memos, the redaction is spatial: every
time John Yoo enters the White House, the text vanishes, only to
reappear as Yoo sets to work on a new version of the memo; as if he were
a puppet, with a demonic master hidden somewhere in the black. My paper
studies the aesthetics of redaction, and asks what we can learn, not
from the information hidden in the pages, but from the form of hiding
itself.
Traveling Cloud Museum: An Archive of People Who Disappear and Reappear
Melinda Hunt
From 2008-2013, I obtained through lawyers 65,000 recent burials records
for people buried on Hart Island, the public cemetery in New York. With
on-line volunteers, I created a digital database that has lead to
legislation in New York City altering the administrative code and
transferring Hart Island to the Parks Department. I received creative
grants to produce portraits and build an on-line system of storytelling
tied to the database of burials. The Traveling Cloud Museum is now in
production. The Hart Island Project recently received a provisional
patent for Cloud Museum's system of interactive clocks of anonymity,
adding a gaming feature to the database of burials. This effort is a
creative approach to preserving the stories of people who disappear in
New York City.
The Physical and Historical Destruction of Seneca Village
Alexander Manevitz
Workers uprooting trees in New York’s Central Park discovered the
remains of an Irish immigrant named Margaret McIntay, and another coffin
“enclosing the body of a negro, decomposed beyond recognition.” By the
time the workers discovered McIntay in 1871, she had been buried there
for at least fourteen years. Unaware that the area used to be the heart
of Seneca Village, a once-vibrant community in upper Manhattan, The New
York Herald expressed bewilderment as to the origin of these bodies when
reporting on the discovery. A geographically removed settlement founded
in 1825 by free African Americans, Seneca Village quickly grew to
include white German and Irish immigrants, three churches, and one
school before the City of New York forcibly evicted the residents in
1857, and razed the community to build Central Park. The Herald’s
surprise indicates how quickly New Yorkers forgot Seneca Village, and
that amnesia persists. My paper analyzes the power discrepancies
involved in the moments of source and archive creation, and how they
shape histories and memories of American urban development. I argue the
historical erasure developed out of three linked dynamics: first, the
twinned processes of source and archival; second, the physical
destruction of the community; and third, the dominant narratives of New
York’s urban progress. These three dynamics have come together to create
archival and historiographical absence that scholars must challenge in
order to more fully understand how a variety of New Yorkers imagined
alternative urban communities in the nineteenth century, and how they
struggled to shape it.
From Public Archives to Archives in the Making: the Evolving Archives of the National Alliance of Black Feminists
Voichita Nachescu
In my paper, I explore the evolving archives of a Second Wave African
American feminist organization and the multiple erasures that contribute
to keeping the organization’s history marginal within histories of the
Second Wave. I argue that the organization has generated three archives.
First, the organization’s archive, in the traditional sense, includes
historical documents of the organization. Second, there is the archive
of books, theses, and activist projects created by the members after the
organization ended in 1983. Lastly, there is an evolving oral history
archive created by researchers and the former members themselves, who
are planning a reunion of the organization. Each of the three archives
offers a different kind of insight into the unfolding history of
intersectional feminism, and I argue that each has been marginalized and/or neglected in a specific way.
Archives of the Palestinian National Movement: A Battle Over the Production of History
Hana Sleiman
In March 1986, Lieutenant Issa from the Algerian armed forces
accompanied Samih Shbeib, head of the Archives and Documents Section at
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Research Center, to Tsebe
military base in the Algerian desert. Lieutenant Issa pointed towards
rows of white boxes covered with tents and said, “this is the
Palestinian Archive.” Little did they know that the archive would still
be there nearly three decades later.
This paper is an inquiry into the curious fate of the PLO Research
Center’s archive. It reconstructs the way in which this archive was lost
and why it was never repatriated, highlighting Israel’s seizure of
Palestinian archives, the Palestinian leadership’s abandonment of their
own records, and the ramifications of this archival absence on the
writing of Palestinian history. In analyzing these ramifications, the
paper turns to the archive established under the Palestinian Authority
in the wake of the 1993 Oslo Agreements. This new national archive was
established as the basis for the history of a re-imagined Palestine. The
paper presents a reading into the difference between the pre-1993
archive and that of the quasi-state to explore the difference between
two archivally constructed Palestines: the metamorphosis of the national
movement from a liberation project into a state building enterprise. It
aims to reveal that what is at stake in silencing one archive and
championing another is silencing the history of one national project,
and giving voice to another, thereby reshaping the boundaries of the
production of modern Palestinian history.
Joshua Craze is a British writer, and the 2014 UNESCO-Aschberg Creative Writing Fellow at the Dar al-Ma'mûn, Morocco. He is currently working a novel, Redacted Mind, and a book under contract with the British publishers Hurst & Co., entitled Line Language: on the borders of the Middle East. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is writing a dissertation on politics and ethics on the Sudan-South Sudan border, and a fellow at The Nation Institute for Investigative Reporting, where his work on American national security has led to a Senate inquiry. His reportage and essays have appeared in the British Guardian, the Washington Monthly, Onsite Review, and Fourth Genre, amongst others. His fiction has appeared in Annalemma and Hotel Amerika. With Mark Huband, he edited The Kingdom: Saudi Arabia and the Challenge of the 21st Century (New York: Columbia University Press/London: Hurst & Co).
Allen Feldman is a cultural anthropologist who has conducted ethnographic research on the politicization of the gaze, the body and the senses in Northern Ireland, South Africa and the post 9/11 global war of terror. His research and teaching interests include visual culture, political aesthetics, political animality, and practice-led media research. Feldman is the author of the critically acclaimed book Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago UP 1991), and numerous essays on political violence as visual and performance culture. He is an Associate Professor in NYU's Media, Culture and Communications program.
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