A soldier stands guard inside Camp 5 at Guantanamo (via Defense Department)
The CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, which consisted of flying terrorist detainees across borders, often for aggressive, extra-legal interrogation, is one of the lasting legacies of the post-9/11 world that Bush and Cheney built.
Over the years, the rendition program has encountered stiff resistance, though never enough to stop it. The Rendition Project, based in the UK, hopes to change that. Or, at the very least, keep it in the public eye.
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A collaborative effort between Kent and Kingston university academics and the non-governmental organization Reprieve, The Rendition Project is sure to piss of a few people in the US and beyond.
“The Rendition Project has begun an ambitious initiative to ‘map’ the global rendition system, providing a detailed analysis of its component parts and a clearer understanding of how they fit together,” reads a release on The Rendition Project’s homepage. “The focus has been on tracking the movement of CIA flights around the world, and individual detainees as they have been transferred between secret prisons for continued detention and torture.”
It wasn’t as if the United States didn’t dabble—nay, excel—in shady covert missions and programs before 9/11. But rendition was and is different because snatching up suspected terrorists for interrogation in foreign countries is so flagrantly, unapologetically imperialistic—although it did succeed because it had the support of a surprising number of nations.
