Eagle Squad
The brave men and women of the GCHQ, here to save the world.
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Office anthropology™
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Legal eagles have unique empowerment from the highest reaches of the great modernist machine.
Now, James Bond famously had a licence to kill, but — let’s face facts — there is only so much you can do with that. Once you have bumped off Scaramanga that’s really that.
Eagle Squad’s power is all the more fearful in that it contemplates indefinite torture of the living. Legal can insist on the most petulant, self-contradictory or wilful editions, on pain of everyone having to stop and wait till the matter is resolved. Whereas others in the legal documentation flow — notably, the heoric, benighted negotiators who are the real brave footsoldiers of legal practice, however hotly the eaglery denies it — have meaningful commercial constraints on the perversity they can bring to their task: they measured, their performance gauged, with no reward for gratuitous abstrusity: their metrics, service level agreements, KPIs — the whole ornate smörgåsbord of modernist fripperies by which their overlords can impel them to carry on — propel them to find solutions, make accommodations, engineer compromises and basically box on — but a fully credentialised Eagle Squad member suffers no such constraint.
She can resist a sovereign immunity waiver from an industrial corporate having no particular association with any organ of state indefinitely, on principle, notwithstanding the fatuity of the request — indeed, because of the fatuity of the request! — with no second-guessing or cajoling from the cheap-seats. It does not matter that the customer would have no hope of claiming sovereign immunity
This is ineffable legal stuff; the risks of compromise passeth all muggle comprehending, and that is that. Eagle Squad has not so much a licence to kill as a licence to die in a ditch.