Black Site, Kabul, Afghanistan 2006 Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York, Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco, and Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne Artist and geographer Trevor Paglen’s books include Torture Taxi (2006), I Could Tell You More But Then You Would Have to be Destroyed by Me (2007), and Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (2009).

“Language is in decline… we would be better off if we spoke and wrote with exactness and grace, and if we preserved, rather than destroyed, the value of our language.”

What follows is a transcription of a conversation with two men recently detained in Alberta, Canada.

“He decreed, too, that blind men were forbidden to sing ballads about miracles, unless they had reliable evidence that such things had indeed happened, because it seemed to him that the miracles most blind men sing about were imaginary, and this was harmful to those which were in fact true.” —Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote