Dirty Work

by Eyal Press

  In fact, the drone program was immune to conventional exposure, the artist and geographer Trevor Paglen suggested. After 9/11, Paglen, a provocateur drawn to clandestine places, began photographing drones and secret U.S. military bases, often by driving down unmarked roads abutting fenced-off areas and attaching a camera to a high-powered telescope. Taken on the sly, Paglen’s photos appeared to subvert the logic of official secrecy, documenting the existence of bases like the Desert Rock Airport, a private airfield in Nevada where “torture taxis” ferreted detainees to various stealth locations after 9/11. But the pictures he took didn’t actually expose much covert activity. Instead, Paglen set about creating allegories, blurred, ethereal images that underscored the opaqueness of the secret world at which he was pointing his camera. Among the more arresting pictures were photos of the Nevada sky flecked with faint black specks that might have been mistaken for birds. The birdlike objects were Reaper and Predator drones, floating on the edge of a band of milky clouds or veiled by the shimmering glow of a dazzling sunrise. Armed drones had infiltrated the landscape in a way that was all but undetectable, the images implied, subverting our ability to see them clearly or even to notice their presence.

  In Blank Spots on the Map, a book published in 2009, Paglen argued that when it came to the “black world” of classified defense activity, Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous maxim “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants” was little more than a comforting illusion. Far from being amenable to public exposure, secrecy tended to “sculpt the world around it,” he posited, creating secret budgets, secret evidentiary rules, secret oaths that employees in the “black world” had to sign that prevented damning information from coming to light. At one point in the book, Paglen told the story of some workers at a secret test site who contracted a mysterious illness that caused their skin to erupt in strange welts and that they suspected resulted from exposure to toxic chemicals. After some of the workers died, a wrongful death lawsuit was filed—a suit in which none of the plaintiffs could be named, because all had signed secrecy oaths (the lawsuit was dismissed, after the government successfully invoked the “state secrets” privilege to prevent any evidence from being disclosed). The “black world” wasn’t just a set of obscure bases, Paglen argued, but a vast, ever-expanding storehouse of knowledge and information that no amount of sunshine could penetrate.

  It was a dark vision. But as even Paglen acknowledged, the state’s ability to keep “blank spots” hidden was not absolute. One of the themes of both his art and his book was that secrecy contained internal contradictions. Among these contradictions was the fact that physical places could not be hidden without announcing their existence in some way. “Blank spots on maps outline the things they seek to conceal,” Paglen observed, which is indeed how the secret outposts of the “black world” had come to his attention. Before becoming an artist, Paglen obtained a PhD in geography at UC Berkeley. One day while doing archival research, he noticed that large swaths of land had been redacted from the archive of the U.S. Geological Survey, “blank spots” that piqued his interest. Like the blacked-out portions of government documents that sometimes caught the eye of investigative journalists and historians, hidden objects could inadvertently draw attention to themselves in this way. “More often than not, their outlines are in plain view,” Paglen averred.

  For all the efforts to keep it concealed, the truth is that the drone program was not so secret. Its existence was hiding in plain sight, in places far easier for ordinary citizens to reach than the covert bases Paglen photographed. To find out how many people had been killed by U.S. drone strikes, one merely had to visit the website of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, one of several organizations that posted detailed estimates online. As risky as it was for drone operators to speak about their experiences, some nevertheless did. And as difficult as classification restrictions made it to report on the drone program, plenty of enterprising journalists found ways: Jonathan Landay of McClatchy, for example, who drew on top secret intelligence reports to show that missiles fired from drones often struck low-level militants rather than terrorists who posed an imminent threat to national security, as the government claimed. (“I’m thankful that my doctors don’t use their definition of imminence,” a former air force lawyer who had served as the chief prosecutor at Guantánamo told Landay. “A head cold could be enough to pull the plug on you.”) Drawing on another cache of classified documents, Ryan Devereaux, a reporter for The Intercept, found that unnamed bystanders made up the vast majority of the victims killed by drones in a campaign in northeastern Afghanistan.

  It was true that Americans rarely heard from civilians who lived in places where U.S. drones patrolled the skies, but information about this, too, was not hard to track down. Among the places where it could be found was Living Under Drones, a report published in 2012 by the Global Justice Clinic at New York University’s School of Law and the Stanford International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic. The report drew on interviews with more than 130 witnesses and survivors of drone strikes in an area of Pakistan, including Khalil Khan, who rushed to the scene of a missile fired from a drone that slammed into a meeting of suspected militants in the town of Datta Khel. Khan spent the rest of the day gathering “pieces of flesh and put[ting] them in a coffin,” he told the researchers, one of dozens of coffins paraded through the streets by grieving villagers after the attack on the meeting, which turned out to be a gathering of tribal elders who had come together to resolve a mining dispute. “They are always surveying us,” said one villager quoted in the report. “We are scared to do anything,” complained another. The ceaseless buzzing of the eyeless planes circling overhead precipitated “emotional breakdowns, running indoors or hiding when drones appear above, fainting, nightmares and other intrusive thoughts, hyper startled reactions to loud noises.” Some villagers were so frightened that they refused to send their children to school. Others avoided crowded places.

  Finding such reports was not actually difficult, provided one bothered to look. Many people didn’t bother. “The blank spots on the map that Paglen describes have their corollary in the blank spots in the mind and in public dialogue,” observed the writer Rebecca Solnit in an essay included in Invisible, a collection of Paglen’s photographs of the Pentagon’s “black world.” To judge by the reaction to Heather Linebaugh’s article in The Guardian, these spots remained blank less because of secrecy than because many “good people” chose not to fill in the details—because they preferred to be kept in the dark.

  By the time I met Heather, she had stopped trying to share the truth with a society she sensed didn’t really want to hear it. She was focused instead on healing herself—through yoga, through meditation, through an experimental form of massage therapy designed to help people overcome trauma and emotional pain. In this, she appeared to be taking after her father, who, she said, had always sought fulfillment by looking inward rather than seeking validation from others. It was a lesson she’d sometimes struggled to apply to herself, including on the day she had chosen to enlist in the military. That decision was driven not only by her wish to get out of her hometown but also by a desire for external validation. Joining the armed forces would enable her to prove all the people who had mocked and doubted her wrong, she believed, to show that she could make something of her life in a patriotic town where American flags hung from the balconies of many homes and military service was viewed with respect. Among the people whose respect she wanted to earn was her father, whom she went to see before leaving for basic training. When she broke the news to him about her decision to serve her country, she figured he’d be proud. Instead, he offered her a gentle warning. “Just remember that the military’s mission is to fight wars and kill people,” he said.

  PART III

  ON THE KILL FLOORS

  6

  Shadow People

  In north-central Mexico, in the state of San Luis Potosí, Flor Martinez grew up with her grandparents in a
small adobe house with no electricity and no running water. The house was in the hills, and the hills were beautiful, but Flor’s grandparents were poor, and her grandfather was a violent alcoholic. Whenever he got drunk, he would fly into a rage and threaten to kill Flor’s grandmother. As a little girl, Flor remembered racing through the house to hide the knives and guns from him. One time, when she was twelve, she crouched behind a chair and watched her uncle pin her grandfather onto a bed to prevent him from stabbing her grandmother.

  That same night, Flor learned that her grandmother was leaving San Luis Potosí and that, in two weeks, she herself would be picked up and taken to another town by her mother. The news came as a shock to Flor, who, until this moment, had assumed that her grandmother was her mother. “No, no,” her grandmother told her, explaining how, shortly after Flor was born, her mother had gone to work as a live-in housekeeper for a wealthy family in another town, leaving her with no time to look after a child of her own. As Flor subsequently discovered, her mother had since started a new family with a man who would soon be taking them to yet another town—a place called Lampasas, in central Texas—to pursue a better life. In the months that followed, after her mother and stepfather departed for the United States, Flor’s own life was subsumed by the needs of her two- and four-year-old half brothers, who were left in her care until money could be saved to pay a smuggler to bring them along. To scrounge up food, she would wake at four in the morning, sneak onto a barge, and collect discarded provisions (rotted bananas, moldy tortillas) from a local garbage dump.

  It was a perilous existence, but Flor did not feel sorry for herself, convinced her fortunes would eventually turn. Her optimism was tested in the next phase of her upbringing, which began just before she turned fifteen, when a coyote arrived to take her and her siblings to Texas. When they reached the border, Flor clung to a raft that the coyote maneuvered across the Rio Grande (she couldn’t swim). Then she heard the coyote holler, “¡La Migra! ¡La Migra!” as helicopters circled overhead, prompting them to turn around. After ducking behind some bushes, they crossed the river again, this time successfully, but the person who was supposed to pick them up and take them to Lampasas never appeared. Flor and her siblings were brought back to Mexico and discarded at a seedy boardinghouse teeming with drug dealers and prostitutes. One night, she ventured out to the bathroom and saw an addict shooting up. They stayed there for six weeks, holed up in a squalid room where they slept and ate all their meals until Flor’s mother sent more money to the smugglers, who, this time, brought them to Lampasas.

  At long last, Flor was reunited with her mother, who lived in a guesthouse on the outskirts of a sprawling ranch where her stepfather had gotten a job. The American couple who owned the ranch were welcoming, calling Flor “Sissy” and encouraging her to go to school and learn English. Flor’s stepfather was less gracious, informing her that if she lived with them, she would have to pay a price. The price he had in mind was sex. When Flor refused his advances, he was undeterred. “What do you think, your mother is going to defend you?” he would taunt her, reminding her that she’d been abandoned as a child. But although he was a large man who could easily have overpowered her, Flor was not afraid. The experiences she’d survived, and the abuses she’d watched her grandmother endure, had imbued her with a streak of fearless defiance. If her stepfather ever touched her, she would resist, she vowed to herself. Sure enough, one night after the lights went out, she felt her stepfather’s hand on her leg. Flor screamed, and her stepfather covered her mouth, but she squirmed out of his grasp and started kicking furiously. The commotion woke her mother, who entered the room and asked what was going on. “Mom, he was touching me!” Flor shrieked. Her mother shot her an icy glare, as though she were at fault. Then she slapped her so hard that her head smacked the wall and blood ran from her mouth.

  After this, Flor knew that her stepfather was right—nobody would defend her—yet she continued to refuse his advances, hiding a knife between her sheets and her pillow in case he snuck into her bed again. Eventually, her stepfather grew so frustrated that he kicked her out of the house. As she ran off, Flor felt a rush of relief. Finally, she was free, she thought as she fled the ranch on foot. But a few hours later, her legs began to tire. As dusk drew near, she curled up to rest on an embankment near an overpass. Where would she sleep? she wondered as she watched the sky darken and the cars zoom by. Before the last of the light faded, a van slowed down in front of her. The driver rolled down the window and addressed her in Spanish, telling her that he and his Mexican family lived nearby and would take her in.

  For nearly a year, Flor lived with the family. During this time, she contacted her mother to tell her where she was. She also asked her to find the address of someone else she’d decided to contact: her biological father. He, too, lived in Texas, she’d heard. She figured she had nothing to lose by reaching out to him. After her mother found an address that matched her father’s name, Flor deposited a letter in the mail. A week or so later, a towering man with broad shoulders and a shaggy beard pulled up in front of the Mexican family’s house. When Flor reached up to hug him, she could scarcely believe it was her father, because he was so tall. After they embraced, he drove her to his home in Brazos County, a rural area that was home to Texas A&M University, to vast expanses of scrub and farmland, and to a smattering of commercial and industrial enterprises, among them a poultry plant owned by a company called Sanderson Farms.

  * * *

  In his 2018 book, God Save Texas, the journalist Lawrence Wright, a lifelong Texan, coined a phrase to describe the 1.6 million undocumented immigrants in the Lone Star State. He called them “shadow people” and suggested their existence was as ubiquitous as cowboys and cattle ranches. “One can’t live in Texas without being aware of those shadow people,” Wright observed. “They tread a line that the rest of us scarcely acknowledge. At any moment, everything can be taken away, and they are thrown back into the poverty, violence, and desperation that drove them to leave their native lands and take a chance living an underground life … The shadow people provide the cheap labor that border states, especially, depend upon. They are not slaves, but neither are they free.”

  In Brazos County, the shadow people worked various menial, low-wage jobs—as farmhands and dishwashers, as landscape and construction workers. Some also worked at the poultry slaughterhouse owned by Sanderson Farms, which was located in the town of Bryan. A few years after her father brought her to Brazos County, Flor applied for a job there, not under her real name, but as “Maria Garcia,” the name on the fake green card that she’d acquired (Flor Martinez is itself a pseudonym). The document raised no eyebrows at the plant, which instantly hired her. According to Flor, a lot of the workers were undocumented at the time, a fact that was no secret to the plant’s supervisors, who periodically warned the workers that if they complained, the supervisors would call immigration.

  Flor’s initial stint at the plant did not last long, not because a supervisor made good on this threat, but because, a few months after she started working there, she overheard that management was looking to hire more supervisors. She passed this information along to a person she thought might be interested—her husband, Manuel, whom she’d recently married after dating for a few years. Manuel got the supervisor job, which created some awkwardness for Flor, both because he knew her real name and because, in the meantime, the two of them learned that his application to become a U.S. citizen had been approved. The news meant that Flor might soon obtain a real green card. When it arrived in the mail, continuing to work at the plant as “Maria Garcia” came to seem foolish, particularly if immigration officials ever were called in to check people’s papers. After discussing the matter with Manuel, she decided to quit.

  Perhaps, Flor thought at the time, she would go back one day and work at the plant under less shadowy circumstances, although another part of her simply felt relief. The job she’d held was in the evisceration department, slicing the glands off the carca
sses of chickens suspended on a conveyor belt—the so-called disassembly line—as it rotated by. The cavalcade of decapitated birds was unsightly. Even worse was the smell, a foul blend of chicken excrement and raw viscera that filled the air. She wouldn’t miss inhaling that stench for hours on end.

  After she quit, Flor spent several years focusing on raising her and Manuel’s three young children. When their youngest daughter started school, she began looking for work again. The first position she found was a part-time job mixing salads at a Texas A&M cafeteria. One day, a customer spotted her and, impressed by her diligence and her cheerful manner, asked whether she might want to come work for him. He owned a local Chick-fil-A, where Flor soon began taking orders in English, a language she’d barely studied and had to learn on the fly. Undaunted, she was soon promoted to team leader, then shift leader, then branch manager. The only problem was that, after all this, she was still making only slightly above the minimum wage. Flor thought she deserved better, so she went to talk to the owner who’d hired her. “Oh, sweetheart, you’ve come a long way,” he said, before explaining that she would have to become fluent in English to get a raise.