Recently, an article written by Klaus Dodds caught my attention. The article concerned itself with the Programme of Extraordinary Rendition conducted by the George W. Bush administration after 9/11. Having come under scrutiny in the recent US Intelligence Committee report on torture, this programme deserves full attention, not only for the immorality of its practices, but also for the implications it has for human rights, international law, and state sovereignty. During the third year of my undergraduate degree I completed a dissertation thesis on this exact issue, analysing the technologies, and mapping the spatialities of the rendition programme. It offered, I think, some insights into the geographies of the War on Terror, and logic of its practices. In 2002, Tony Blair made the comment: “This is a moment to seize. The kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us”. This quote reflects a view by Western governments like the UK and US of the post-9/11 world as one of both chaos, but also political opportunity. It is in this zeitgeist, shared by Blair’s political partner and friend, George W. Bush, that the rendition program became complicitous with the US Government’s War on Terror. Bush’s administration understood the post 9/11 threat of international terrorism as part of a geopolitical era where there was a ‘moral duty’ to wage war against terror. Bush helped create a network comprised of a number of CIA ‘black sites’, or secret detention centres, in numerous countries all over the world. It was at these sights, and in the transportation to them, that suspected terrorists would be interrogated, tortured, and denied access to basic human liberties. Whilst the legality and morality of these practices are highly problematic, it is their spatiality that I think is particularly interesting. When delving into the literature of US extra-juridical detention, Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception is a significant source. While useful in explaining how these spaces might operate, they don’t explain how they come about and get assembled. Looking beyond Agamben’s work, and the ‘suspension’ of law, it is productive to ask questions about what spatialities enable these practices, and how they map onto the international political map. In a similar article written by Dodds and Peter Adey, the space of the airport is emphasised, by its central role in both globalising rendition and controlling mobilities. For me, the use of airports highlight how the rendition programme was pervasive in every day sites and spaces, but at the same time completely hidden from view. Rather than thinking of the airport as a place produced by geographies of globalisation, instead we can view it as a space that enables the production of, what Derek Gregory and Allan Pred would call, discrete violent geographies. In an alarming twist of the recognised norm, the use of civilian airports as points of refuelling, and loading and offloading, shows how domestic structures were enrolled in dark and illicit geographies. In a similar fashion, the bureaucratic structures at the heart of the renditions were civilian companies. Private companies would acts as brokers, contractors, and suppliers of personnel to the flights that took place. As a result, these practices render the line between combatants and non-combatants incoherent as the impact of warfare becomes unknowingly immediate and part of the lived experience. These two examples show how it is the very banal and everyday nature of these sites that conversely enable these covert violent geographies to take place. Where civilian spaces would once be demarcated as separate from military spaces, now they overlap, and terror and politics are reflected through reconfigured everyday spatialities. A battleground thus emerges which is not in some distant War on Terror, but rather is wrapped in the foundations, sites, and visuals of the everyday. Going beyond the airport also gives us a better understanding of rendition evolved through these new spaces. The rendition programme takes, what Derek Gregory would call, the ‘global battlespace’ as its remit. This system explicitly challenges the state sovereignty of the 50+ nations thought to have been used in the process. Paradoxically, at the same time as challenging sovereignty, rendition draws upon sovereignty to be able to conduct these violent technologies. In a very real sense it breathes life into Hobbes’ Leviathan figure, where it is the sovereign who holds the power to determine the life and death of its subjects. Therefore, understanding extraordinary rendition as an act of sovereign spatial transformation, rather than sovereign decline, leads to the conclusion that this practice sees the unbundling of sovereignty from territory, into a new networked global space. Similarly in terms of legality, I would argue it is more productive to think of the rendition programme as the transformation of legal space, rather than an attempt to annihilate law by space. Francois Ewald argues that law cannot disappear, but rather its constitution changes from one of universal or international principles, to one of selective societal demand. Thus, I agree with the argument made by Trevor Paglen in his book Torture Taxi, that rendition is “a programme whose existence has sculpted law into its own image”. The airport, and the evolution of new spaces of rendition, are spatially complex, partly due to their secrecy. To understand these geographies, it is imperative to know what to look for. This is a difficult task, when all information about these practices remain confidential and inaccessible. Adopting Paglen’s argument of the logic of invisibility offers a thought provoking exercise in how we might map secretive and seemingly ‘invisible’ practices. Paglen points out that everything that exists has to intersect the visible world at some point. Therefore, there lies a contradictory nature to secret state practices: they are organised through a logic of invisibility and silence, yet by nature they have to have material properties and parts that, when looked at in the right way, can be made visible.
Dodds and Adey make the point that flights could just “disappear and reappear”. However, by working with Paglen’s argument, these flights don’t disappear; they work through an alternate spatial logic. To be able to see these ‘invisible’ practices, we just have to find the boundaries of intersection of these practices with the visible world. Nigel Thrift’s essay entitled ‘It’s the little things’ couldn’t be more alarmingly appropriate at this juncture. Thrift argues the material and small aspects of people’s lives, and the practices that surround them, deserve attention. As Dodds and Adey rightly point out, it was the role of plane spotters that provided the first discovery of this suspicious programme. Their observations of mysterious planes landing at obscure hours at remote airports, highlighted small but strange practices running against the norm. The seeming banality of the practices associated with rendition both provided their secrecy, but also their enabled their undoing. Nigel Thrift couldn’t have been more right when he reminded us to be attentive to ‘the little things’. In a complex global programme, where covert and dark practices were hidden through blurred distinctions of domestic/foreign, combatant/non-combatant, and legal/illegal, it was the tiniest detail of a few planes that provided visible clues to its existence.
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August 2015
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