Preventing Rendition and Torture by Mapping the Global System of Rendition and Proxy Detention

This paper seeks to explain the development and operation of a now global system of rendition and secret detention. Rendition involves the kidnap of suspects and their illicit transfer to another state and frequently involves torture. It is generally assumed that rendition was very much a phenomenon of the Bush administration. In fact, it has continued since Obama took office, despite his early executive orders which ruled out some of the other nefarious practices of the Bush administration, such as torture. Situating rendition within the wider framework of US neo-imperial practices, particularly the quest for US hegemony within the global military-industrial complex, the paper provides a detailed account of the development and evolution of the global system of rendition. It analyses the ways in which key moments in US and international politics have impacted on rendition practices, and also shows how rendition constitutes the latest iteration of international state terrorism

Insulating Universal Human Rights from the ‘Ethical Foreign Policy’ Threat

At the heart of the notion of an ethical foreign policy is the assumption that foreign policy can help deliver liberty and security around the globe. Yet, as Conor Gearty has argued, in our contemporary ‘neo-democratic’ world, liberty and security are not the universal goods they are often considered to be. Rather they are selectively granted, and curtailed for those considered a threat to the status quo. Where liberty and security are curtailed, this is often in the name of the universal freedoms that neo-democracies claim to uphold. When the Blair government was elected in 1997, Foreign Secretary Robin Cook announced that British foreign policy must have an ethical dimension. There has been much debate on whether UK foreign policy under the Blair government can be argued to have been ‘ethical’. The focus of debate has tended to be the UK’s military interventions. Far less attention has been paid to the direct role played by UK authorities, through its intelligence services, in human rights violations under the New Labour and subsequent Coalition governments. This paper seeks to further the debate on the ethics of UK foreign policy since 1997. It does so by offering a detailed account of the UK’s involvement in the CIA’s rendition programme, and shows that the UK was far more involved in rendition and secret detention between 2001 and 2010 than was previously assumed. Threaded through the analysis is an account of the various measures taken by the New Labour subsequent Coalition governments to suppress the evidence of UK involvement. We conclude by offering some reflections on the role human rights organisations, litigators, and investigative journalists are increasingly playing in defending the universalism of rights, for publics that rarely appreciate what is really at stake

Western State Terrorism

States use terror to achieve political ends, by employing violence to ensure compliance and to coerce populations away from dissent. Moreover, despite popular understandings of terrorism as a ‘strategy of the weak’ used against liberal democracies, an examination of the history of Western foreign policy shows that democracies have often returned to the use of state terror in order to cement their regional or global dominance. This chapter explores the use of state terror by the West, and seeks to provide an understanding of its underlying purposes. We argue that Western state terror is one of a number of coercive tools used to secure and maintain access to resources and markets, whether in colonial times, during periods of imperial decline, or as an adjunct to the more recent roll-out of neoliberal forms of globalisation

Rendition in the "War on Terror"

The CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation (RDI) programme was a central component of the first phase of the ‘war on terror’, from 2001-2008. Through constructing a global network of secret prisons, wherein hundreds of terror suspects were tortured, the US and its allies embarked upon a concerted campaign of state terrorism in pursuit of their wider political goals. This chapter provides an account of the employment of state terror through the CIA’s RDI programme. We outline the main features of the programme, and the involvement of a range of other states, many of which were Western democracies. We also show that the attempt to secure valuable intelligence through coercion, torture and terror proved to be a clear failure, resulting in the detention and torture of dozens of individuals who posed no threat and the use of barbaric methods which did nothing but produce poor intelligence and dehumanise all those involved

Inter-state terrorism in the 21st Century: Mapping the Evolution of the Global Rendition System

This paper seeks to explain the development and operation of a now global system of rendition and secret detention in the ‘War on Terror’. The paper offers two corrections to current understandings of rendition. Firstly, while existing scholarship has emphasised the use of rendition as a counter-terrorism tool during the Reagan and Clinton administrations, there has been no analysis of the role played by rendition in the much longer history of the efforts at the heart of US foreign policy to insulate US hegemony. The paper will show that rendition is the most recent in a long line of tools that have been developed by US intelligence and defence officials to carve out extra-legal spaces to deal with perceived threats. Secondly, the paper seeks to show that the global rendition system is a system in flux. Various pressures beyond the US government’s control have forced the US Executive and intelligence and defence services to make major changes to the global rendition system in desperate attempts to maintain that extra-legal space that it believes it needs to thwart threats to its interests

Da Vinci Fluids, catch-up dynamics and dense granular flow

We introduce and study a da Vinci Fluid, a fluid whose dissipation is dominated by solid friction. We analyse the flow rheology of a discrete model and then coarse-grain it to the continuum. We find that the model gives rise to behaviour that is characteristic of dense granular fluids. In particular, it leads to plug flow. We analyse the nucleation mechanism of plugs and their development. We find that plug boundaries generically expand and we calculate the growth rate of plug regions. In systems whose internal effective friction coefficient is relatively uniform we find that the linear size of plug regions grows as (time)$^{1/3}$. The suitability of the model to granular materials is discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, edited for clarifications and added reference

Dirty Little Secrets: State and Corporate Complicity in Rendition, Secret Detention and Torture

Based on a comprehensive investigation into the nature and evolution of the global rendition system, this paper seeks to provide an account of the extent of British involvement in and knowledge of that system. It shows that UK authorities have been complicit in a wide range of human rights violations associated with rendition, secret detention and torture. Using Stanley Cohen’s framework for explaining how states deny involvement in and knowledge of atrocities we demonstrate the various ways that the UK government sought to cover up both its knowledge of the system, and its role within it. The paper is also aimed at offering some insights into how we have undertaken the research into these highly secretive practices. The paper begins by setting out the key elements of the global rendition system. It then explains how each of those elements violates various human rights conventions before going on to examine the extent of British involvement, and the lengths the British government went to in denying both knowledge of the system and complicity in it

Mimicking indoor climate dynamics and ammonia emissions in a pig housing compartment using artificial pigs and an automatic urea spraying installation

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