The Rendition Project, a three-year examination of 11,006 flights linked to the CIA, offers new data on the international transport of suspected terrorists after the September 11 attacks. After combing through flight data, British researchers have flagged at least 1,556 “suspicious” flights that could have been part of the CIA’s rendition program.
The Rendition Project website details numerous instances in which the CIA carried out secret flights across the world, stopping in the U.K. and other countries to refuel aircraft on the way to a secret prison in Romania where, according to previous reports, the CIA carried out tortured suspected terrorists in an effort to extract intelligence.
British researchers claim to have found at least 20 “dummy” flights within the data. These dummy flights were identified when flight paths were logged with air traffic controllers but not followed by aircraft. Instead, the planes took a different route to alternate airports — possibly to pick up or drop off a detainee.
In one example from December 2001, researchers claim Mohamed el-Zery and Ahmed Agiza were transported from Sweden to Egypt, where they were detained and tortured for several months before being brought to trial. Swedish authorities drove the men to Stockholm-Bromma Airport. There they were handed over to U.S. and Egyptian officials who had arrived on a CIA-owned Gulfstream V jet with the registration N379P.
The researchers claim that the dummy flight logged a path from Egypt to the U.K. and the U.S. before returning to Egypt. In reality, the flight went directly from Sweden to Egypt.
In May 2007, Agiza joined several other victims in a lawsuit, claiming they were tortured. The plaintiffs are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Rendition Project’s researchers — Ruth Blakeley, a senior lecturer at the University of Kent; Sam Raphael, a senior lecturer at Kingston University; and Crofton Black, an investigator with the legal charity Reprieve — believe that their findings offer never-before-seen information about the global war on terror.
“By bringing together a vast collection of documents and data, the Rendition Project publishes the most detailed picture to date of the scale, operation and evolution of the global system of rendition and secret detention in the so-called war on terror,” said Blakeley.
The flight data sheds light on the anti-terror rendition program carried out by the CIA after the September 11 attacks. A report released in February, called “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition,” reported that the CIA operated “black sites” that were used to detain and torture roughly 130 suspected terrorists.
“The United States prides itself on being a leader in the field of human rights, and now we have courts around the world saying that the United States is a torturer,” Amrit Singh, who authored the report, told NBC News. “Those kinds of findings really undermine the United States’ ability to advocate for human rights around the world.”
Human rights organizations and researchers believe the U.S. carried out torture in order to extract information in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other high-level al-Qaida terrorists.
Waterboarding, considered a form of “enhanced interrogation” by the Bush administration, was used against detainees held by the United States. The process gives the detainee the sensation of drowning and has been labeled a form of torture by human rights groups.
“Waterboarding is torture. It causes severe physical suffering in the form of reflexive choking, gagging, and the feeling of suffocation. It may cause severe pain in some cases. If uninterrupted, waterboarding will cause death by suffocation,” writes Human Rights Watch.
The Obama administration said that “enhanced interrogation tactics” played only a small role in the Osama bin Laden killing, and has argued that the al-Qaida leader would have been caught without the controversial tactics. President Obama said in 2009 that he believed waterboarding was “torture” and a “mistake.”
“Yes, some of it came from some of the tactics that were used at that time, interrogation tactics that were used,” said former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in a February interview. “But the fact is, we — we put together most of that intelligence without having to resort to that.”