Informal Multilateral Authoritarian Practices

Abstract

Abstract This chapter examines extraordinary rendition, involving many political actors across the globe but led by the CIA, as a case study of informal multilateral authoritarianism. It focuses on the silencing, secrecy, and disinformation surrounding rendition rather than on the treatment of those detained as such. The chapter starts with detailed accounts of two cases: so-called ‘high-value detainee’ Abu Zubaydah, who ended up in Guantanamo Bay, and the simpler case of Abu Omar, kidnapped in Italy and kept in detention in Egypt. It then zooms out to examine broader multilateral authoritarian practices relating to rendition both in so-called ‘high-value’ and ‘bilateral’ cases. The extraordinary rendition programme was a classic ‘covert op’. Its primary actors were always aware of how controversial it was and were devoted to its secrecy. Long after the existence of the programme as such was exposed, members of the CIA still went to tremendous lengths to keep the sites at which ‘high value detainees’ were held secret. More broadly, members of the US Administration maintained the consistent claim, against all the evidence, that ‘enhanced interrogation’, i.e. torture, saved lives.