The Rendition Circuit

They were loaded onto aircraft in the dark. Hooded. Bound. Dressed in diapers for the flight. Their destinations appeared on no official manifest. Their names appeared in no detention register. As far as any government would officially admit, these men did not exist as prisoners because the places holding them did not exist at all.

This is the story of how the United States government, in the years after September 11, 2001, built a secret detention network that spanned more than fifty countries, moved prisoners across continents on aircraft registered to shell companies, and housed them in facilities that operated in deliberate violation of every international legal commitment the United States had publicly made.

It is a story of airplanes and lawyers. Of tail numbers traced through Eurocontrol logs and corporate registrations that led to vacant lots. Of legal opinions engineered to transform torture into a category that didn't quite exist. Of European allies who opened their airports, their intelligence bases, and in some cases their soil to CIA detention facilities, then denied it for a decade until courts in Strasbourg ruled otherwise.

THE RENDITION CIRCUIT draws on the full public record: the Senate Intelligence Committee's landmark 2014 investigation, declassified CIA cables, European Court of Human Rights judgments against Poland, Romania, and Lithuania, the Council of Europe's aviation investigations, and the testimony of survivors who have spent years attempting to establish, in courts that mostly declined to hear them, that what was done to them actually happened.

You will follow the Gulfstream V with no passengers on its manifest across three continents. You will sit in the deliberations at CIA headquarters where the decision was made to destroy 92 videotapes of interrogation sessions. You will read the legal reasoning that turned waterboarding into something other than torture, and then watch that reasoning collapse in courtrooms across the world.

You will meet the men who were taken. Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen seized by mistake, held for five months, then quietly returned to a road in Albania and told to walk. Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who spent a year in a Syrian cell on the basis of information his own government later admitted was wrong. The unnamed man who died of hypothermia on a concrete floor in Kabul in November 2002, and whose death produced a reprimand that was never implemented and a cash bonus for the officer in charge.

This is not a book that argues. It presents what happened: the routes, the facilities, the cooperating governments, the contractors, the psychologists who designed the techniques, the lawyers who authorized them, and the courts that looked away. It ends where the story has so far ended, in a condition of partial accountability and permanent unresolved tension between documented fact and withheld justice.

The circuit ran. These are its routes. And the reckoning, such as it has been, has fallen far short of what the facts demand.