From Seymour Hersh, “The General’s Report,” about the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib:

A recently retired C.I.A. officer, who served more than fifteen years in the clandestine service, told me that the task-force teams “had full authority to whack—to go in and conduct ‘executive action,’ ” the phrase for political assassination. “It was surrealistic what these guys were doing,” the retired operative added. “They were running around the world without clearing their operations with the ambassador or the chief of station.”

J.S.O.C.’s [Joint Special Operations Command] special status undermined military discipline. Richard Armitage, the former Deputy Secretary of State, told me that, on his visits to Iraq, he increasingly found that “the commanders would say one thing and the guys in the field would say, ‘I don’t care what he says. I’m going to do what I want.’ We’ve sacrificed the chain of command to the notion of Special Operations and GWOT”—the global war on terrorism. “You’re painting on a canvas so big that it’s hard to comprehend,” Armitage said.

Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has made an observation crucial to understanding the place of art and law.  What does it mean to paint on a canvas so big that it’s hard to comprehend?  In Hans Hoffman’s The Search for the Real in Painting, the real is found to resonate in the picture plane by the interaction of the elements therein, primarily form, line, and color.  Hoffman states that every canvas begins with a primary reference in the edges of the picture plane, the first “lines” of our painting.  We do not have borders on our expansive picture plane, but instead frontiers, areas beyond which we have not seen, have not acted. Our canvas is so vast that we cannot even comprehend the Real which we are attempting to make it resonate with.   We see only the field of action (or “executive action,” if you will), the “surrealistic” space without reference beyond itself.  Imagining a canvas so big that its edges cannot even be comprehended, we can concentrate on that which is within our particular view — on a small facet of the picture plane, and around us we can see only territory, far into the distance.  We begin our search for the Real, to resonate within this field, but we can walk miles  and miles upon this field, and will find no end, not even an interruption.  The global war on terror is a remarkably descriptive title.  If “war” denotes the field of action, then the canvas is in fact global and seamless, and we may walk on its surface till our feet bleed, and still find only our red foot prints.