Measuring extraordinary rendition and international cooperation

Abstract

Following the launch of the global war on terror, the United States of America established a global rendition network that saw the transfer of CIA terrorist suspects to secret detention sites across the world. There has been considerable debate over how many countries participated in rendition and secret detention during the post-9/11 period, and conventional accounts of foreign complicity suggest that diverse countries were involved, including many established democracies. However, research on rendition has been plagued by uncertainty, a lack of data and systematic empirical evidence due to the secret nature of counterterrorism cooperation. In this article, I argue that it is possible to study the practice of rendition, unlike many other forms of clandestine security cooperation, as it is partially observable. Specifically, suspected extraordinary rendition flight paths can be tracked using publicly available flight data. This article uses the world's largest set of public flight data relating to rendition to estimate cross-country collaboration in rendition and secret detention. The result suggests 307 likely rendition flights and 15 new participating countries beyond the 54 known cases, with cross validation tests demonstrating high levels of model accuracy.

Human rights fact-finding and the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation programme: A response to Cordell

“…In her article, ‘Measuring extraordinary rendition and international cooperation’, published in International Area Studies Review , Rebecca Cordell seeks to subject the Rendition Flights Database to a model-based statistical analysis (Cordell, 2017). She argues that her analysis suggests that more countries were involved in the CIA’s rendition programme than our work has previously established, and that many more flights in the Database than we have identified are likely to be connected to rendition operations.…”

“…These flights are part of circuits which involve more than 80 separate countries. Cordell’s 307 ‘new likely rendition flights’ appear in the Database, as do the 15 ‘previously unidentified participating countries’ (Cordell, 2017: 183). As such, Cordell’s analysis, as far as we are able to ascertain, replicates our existing findings.…”

Dutch tolerance of torture? CIA extraordinary rendition flights in the Netherlands

“…Therefore, other governments must be (passively) involved in ERFs. This involvement has increasingly come under scrutiny as the involved governments may be complicit in torture (Blakely, 2011;Cordell, 2017). The Netherlands is not listed as a participating state in ERFs (OSJI, 2013) and seems to comply with several torture prohibition and human rights treaties, such as the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR).…”

“…Giving an accurate overview is further complicated because, next to the CIA, more agencies have been involved such as the US Department of Defense and the FBI (Mayer, 2005;Messineo, 2009). Therefore, we have taken on board recommendations to utilize publicly available flight data and other relevant data on known and suspected ERFs to evidence their existence, and document their characteristics (Raphael et al, 2016;Cordell, 2017). That information shows that a significant amount of individuals have been sent to third countries, of which some were detained at CIA "black sites" 1 (Satterthwaite, 2008), and despite estimation differences, there seems to have been an increase in the number of observed cases (Brysk and Shafir, 2007;Efrat, 2015;Raphael et al, 2016).…”

“…Neither is all relevant air traffic registered, meaning flight data is not representative of the number of ERFs because case details of flights are not provided due to the secret nature of ERFs. Data on ERF landings at Dutch airports are most likely incomplete, and we, therefore, also studied reports of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), (critical) media reports and documentaries, and, especially for our scrutiny of the political discourse, documented (official) responses coming from the political domain (Brysk and Shafir, 2007;Blakeley and Raphael, 2013;Brooks, 2016;Raphael et al, 2016;Cordell, 2017).…”