Justice & Law Quote by Cofer Black

A sentence like this is how a national security state clears its throat. Cofer Black isn’t reassuring you; he’s building a procedural moat. “We operate under the law” lands as a ritual incantation, the kind meant to end the conversation before it begins. It asserts legitimacy while refusing the public any usable detail about what that legitimacy permits.

The second line does the real work. “Covert action authorities are communicated in a memorandum of notification” translates raw power into paperwork. Notice the passive, institutional grammar: authorities are “communicated,” not debated; in “a memorandum,” not in public; of “notification,” not accountability. The phrase suggests oversight while quietly defining it downward: someone is told, somewhere, that something has been authorized. That’s not transparency; it’s a chain of custody for secrets.

The intent is defensive and strategic: to signal that covert operations have a lawful wrapper, without exposing the moral, operational, or political reality inside it. The subtext is almost bureaucratically brazen: the system’s legitimacy comes from process, not from public consent or even public knowledge. In the post-9/11 era Black is associated with, this kind of language functioned as a pressure valve for democratic discomfort - an assurance that extraordinary acts remained “normal” because they passed through authorized channels. The genius, and the chill, is how it converts contested violence into administrative routine.