The letter stated that the CIA could “neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence” of records responsive to their request. The phrase was extracted from a letter sent by the CIA to the ACLU rejecting their Freedom of Information request for documents relating to the government’s covert drone program. It is part of a project called Severe Clear and follows on from a skywriting performance last Memorial Day weekend for which I had the words “EXISTENCE OR NONEXISTENCE” written above the New York City skyline. This flight was my response to that invitation. Congress later passed a resolution proclaiming “the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations,” inviting Americans to fly their flag and observe the date “with appropriate ceremonies.”

Veterans Day, or Armistice Day as it was originally named, was first observed on November 11, 1919, commemorating the end of WWI with a moment of silence. Such policies upend the presumption of innocence, circumventing international laws governing the treatment of prisoners and the safeguarding of civilians during war. In the case of “signature” drone strikes, individuals may be targeted for assassination based on ostensibly suspicious patterns of behavior, while a delusive definition of the term combatant counts any male of military age in proximity of an attack, without explicit evidence posthumously proving them innocent. At Guantánamo, a “preponderance of the evidence,” the standard applied in deciding civil disputes over money, is enough to detain a person indefinitely without trial. Tens of thousands of people have found themselves arbitrarily consigned to the American No Fly List without due process or a meaningful right to appeal. Yet today, in a whole range of cases related to the so-called “War on Terror,” guilt is pronounced on the most meager of circumstantial grounds. As such, it is a jurisprudential ideal: the highest standard of justice to which a society can strive. In American courts, juries are asked to convict or acquit on the basis of “reasonable doubt,” since proving a defendant’s guilt beyond the shadow of a doubt is all but impossible. The phrase refers to an unattainable burden of proof. Today, on Veterans Day, on the 11th day of the 11th month, an aircraft began circling the Statue of Liberty trailing a banner that read “THE SHADOW OF A DOUBT.”

Prove without a shadow of doubt