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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Mar 2009, 416 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2010, 416 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Amy Reading
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This article relates to The Tourist
Representing the Clandestine
If Tourism, Olen Steinhauer's invented black-ops division within the CIA, were
real, what would its insignia look like? Trevor Paglen has documented seventy-five
shoulder patches designed for United States covert agencies in his book, I
Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me. (The title
is a translation from Latin of the patch for the Navy Air Test and Evaluation
Squadron 4, at Point Mugu in California).
He submitted hundreds of Freedom of
Information requests for the images, then decoded their heraldry and iconography
by interviewing military men and women. If, for instance, you see a patch with
five stars on top and one star on the bottom, you know it has something to do
with the notorious Area 51, the secretive military base where spy aircraft and
weaponry are tested and aliens supposedly held in captivity.
The idea of insignia
for a secret mission seems parodic, but in fact it is so true and so ridiculous
that Paglen flustered Stephen Colbert when he tried to joke about it on "The
Colbert Report". The Utne Reader's article on Paglen includes an image
gallery of the patches.
This "beyond the book article" relates to The Tourist. It originally ran in March 2009 and has been updated for the
February 2010 paperback edition.
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