Rendering for Torture: Enacting Secrecy Through Fabrication and Division

Abstract

This paper explores how specific provisions of the NATO cooperation framework, as well as those governing international civil aviation, were strategically used by the CIA to maintain the secrecy surrounding the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) programme during the early years of the War on Terror. Building on Timothy Pachirat’s ‘politics of sight’, critical security and secrecy studies, as well as agnotology, we position secrecy as a central analytical category, inquiring into practices and tactics through which it is enacted. We mobilise two key concepts – fabrication and division – to analyse secrecy in the context of RDI programme. Fabrication refers to the manipulation of aircraft classifications, registration numbers, and flight plans to obscure rendition operations, while division captures how access to classified information by those involved in the programme was partial and fragmented. We argue that processes of fabrication and division contributed to concealing the operational details of the RDI programme. This paper contributes to the emerging research agenda in international relations that explores how international politics and practices are not only shaped by knowledge-making processes but also by the (deliberate) production of ignorance.