The Rendition Project is a product of a collaborative research between Dr. Ruth Blakely from the University of Kent and Dr. Sam Raphael from Kingston University, London.
Now anyone with an internet connection can understand, view, and track over 11,000 CIA flights detainees may have been aboard between 2001 and 2006 under the US rendition program, a murky operation of secret detention and torture.
“Our purpose is to shed as much light as possible on this system,” Blakely was quoted by Russia Today.
Blakely’s team has compiled a unique database sourced from freedom of information requests, testimonies from detainees, Red Cross reports, courtroom evidence, flight records, and invoices.
The data is categorized into four subcategories- flights which definitely had a detainee on board, those which are suspected of having suspected terrorists on board, and ‘dummy’ or test flights, and other circuit flights, all on 122 different US-registered civilian aircraft.
Most information was already in the public domain, but Blakely hopes by making it web-accessible, the project will assist human rights investigators and lawyers to defend the rights of detainees who have been victims to unfair torture or questionable tactics.
The site will help reveal “how the CIA managed to hide individuals in this system as it transported them around the world to hold them in prisons where they could be tortured and interrogated,” said Blakely.
Scotland is the only country so far which has raised any questions on the alleged rendition activity on home soil.
The CIA’s black sites in over 54 countries have been allegedly used to detain and torture suspected terrorists, and to hold them in custody before being transported to the prison at Guantanamo Bay and other torture and detention centers worldwide.
The EU parliament has previously called upon Poland, Lithuania, and Romania to reveal any ‘black sites’, or airports used to aid the CIA’s secret rendition program.