A multiyear investigation into the use of rendition, secret detention and torture by US and UK intelligence agencies in the ‘war on terror’ and beyond.
Unredacted’s Torture Project builds on our earlier work with The Rendition Project, an ESRC-funded project which ran from 2010-2019 and was at the forefront of efforts to uncover the use of rendition, secret detention and torture by the CIA and its allies in the ‘war on terror’. Our final report in 2019, CIA Torture Unredacted (co-published with The Bureau of Investigative Journalism), remains the most detailed public account to date of the CIA torture programme.
Unredacted is picking up where The Rendition Project left off. We are working to build the most comprehensive collection of documents and associated analysis relating to the use of rendition, secret detention and torture by US, UK and allied intelligence agencies after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001. Many of these practices took place within the context of the CIA’s torture programme, known formally as the Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) programme, which ran from 2001-2009. During this period, the CIA established and ran a global network of secret prisons (so-called ‘black sites’) for the purposes of detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects – in secret, indefinitely, and under the most extreme conditions. As a result, scores of men were kidnapped and disappeared into the programme, held incommunicado for weeks, months or years on end, and subjected to the systematic use of brutal interrogation techniques which clearly amounted to torture.
We also continue to support global accountability efforts for the severe abuses which resulted from this programme. The findings from our investigation continue to underpin the work of legal teams around the world, including at the European Court of Human Rights, the International Criminal Court, the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay, and in UK courts. This includes the current challenges by victims of CIA torture at the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal, where two men who are still held at Guantánamo Bay, over 20 years since their capture, have lodged complaints in relation to the involvement of British intelligence in their mistreatment while they were held by the CIA.
Indeed, despite the fact that UK government officials have consistently and repeatedly denied any involvement in torture, it is now clear that British officials – up to and including ministers – knew that the CIA torture programme existed and worked hand-in-glove with US authorities to enable the programme to operate. British intelligence officials worked closely with counterterrorism partners, including the CIA, to identify, locate and apprehend terror suspects and disappear them into secret detention where torture was endemic. Once suspects were detained, British intelligence agencies were, in many cases, intimately involved in the torture which took place, either by directly participating in the interrogations, by providing the intelligence or asking the questions that formed the basis of the torture, or by receiving the ‘intelligence product’ gained through torture (much of which was, unsurprisingly, of poor intelligence value).
In the absence of a full judge-led inquiry, which continues to be refused by the British government, this project will provide the most comprehensive public accounting of the nature and extent of UK involvement in rendition, secret detention and torture during the ‘war on terror’.
