Extraordinary Rendition

2012 “Of Camps, Gulags & Extraordinary Renditions: Infrastructural Violence in Romania,” Ethnography, 13(4): Forthcoming.

by Bruce O'Neill

Paper prepared for a special issue of Ethnography (13/4) on “Infrastructural Violence" edited by Bruce O'Neill and Dennis Rodgers.

From fascist prisons to Communist-era gulags, Romania does not simply have a history of torture, but also an existing... more From fascist prisons to Communist-era gulags, Romania does not simply have a history of torture, but also an existing infrastructure conducive to its practice. Romania, human rights organizations have made clear, hosted a number of “secret detention centers” used by the U.S. Government in its program of “extraordinary rendition,” whereby intelligence agents illegally rendered, detained and tortured suspected terrorists. Both Romania’s gulags and its secret detention centers call to mind Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “the camp” – an extra-juridical space where human life is reduced to its bare form – which is why this article pivots on a historical comparison between the two. While both gulags and extraordinary rendition share material infrastructure, and both were organized around the production and management of “bare life,” this article shows that rendition operates through a very different spatial logic than a gulag. As a result, survivors of these different spatial iterations of “the camp” offer qualitatively different accounts of bare life. This observation allows ethnographers to extend Agamben’s analytical reach by spatially contextualizing the form, relations and kinds of violence taking shape inside “camps,” allowing theorists to think about bare life as a historically specific phenomenon.

project:rendition

by Joy Garnett

Photoessay of collaboration by JC2, in Public Culture, Vol.22, no.1 (Winter 2010) Duke University Press.

project:rendition was a collaborative project that incorporated elements of installation, printed agitprop, audio, and... more project:rendition was a collaborative project that incorporated elements of installation, printed agitprop, audio, and performance into an interactive environment. The project was produced by JC2, a collective comprising the artists Joy Episalla, Joy Garnett, Carrie Moyer, and Carrie Yamaoka. The exhibition took place in May–June 2007 at Momenta Art, an artist-run charitable institution in Brooklyn that promotes emerging and underrepresented artists.

project:rendition used the enactment of “rendering” to examine military policies hidden from public view. The term extraordinary rendition refers to the clandestine kidnapping and extradition of suspected terrorists to countries where they can be interrogated and tortured beyond the reach of the U.S. judicial system. While extraordinary rendition is generally reserved for supposed highvalue suspects, subtler forms of political repression, stateinduced terror, and disenfranchisement are common, insidious, and long-standing. Throughout history, similar acts have proved effective means of rendering individuals and entire populations politically mute or existentially invisible.

Hope and Despair: My Struggle to Free My Husband, Maher Arar (review)

by Nisha Nath

Canadian Ethnic Studies, Volume 39, Number 3, 2007, pp. 213-215

What's so extraordinary about rendition?

by James D. Boys

Published in The International Journal of Human Rights, 15: 4, 589 — 604 2011

The election of the first non-white president of the United States was believed to signify a change from the Bush... more The election of the first non-white president of the United States was believed to signify a change from the Bush years and an end to a neo-conservative foreign policy of pre-emption and extraordinary rendition. However, this has not necessarily occurred Indeed, far from being radical, the Bush Administration was simply continuing policies implemented by Bill Clinton. This paper will reveal the extent to which rendition, long before it was considered to be extraordinary, was devised, developed and initiated by Bush’s Democratic predecessor and the extent to which a war on terror was being waged by the United States long before the election of George W. Bush with the accompanying contradictions between the values and methods. Long before Bush was in office, the White House was waging a war on Osama bin Laden, with the stated hope of watching his demise in real time, and using rendition to destroy al Qaida ‘brick by brick.’

Hunting the “Out-of-Place Muslim”

by Darryl Li

SAMAR -- South Asian Magazine for Action and Reflection, 31 May, 2011

The Global War on Terror’s fixation on al-Qa‘ida as a roving band of "foreign fighters" allows the U.S. to... more The Global War on Terror’s fixation on al-Qa‘ida as a roving band of "foreign fighters" allows the U.S. to claim that it is not fighting a war on Islam, but rather helping local Muslim populations rid themselves of narrow-minded interlopers  seeking to impose a puritanical brand of the religion.  This hunt for foreign fighters animates broader attempts to monitor and control Muslim diasporas outside the "west."  At the same time, the legal impunity of other foreign fighters – namely, U.S. forces and their contractors – is pushed into the background.