Extraordinary rendition is the practice by which the CIA seizes terrorism suspects in one country and transports them to a third country — often a country with no due-process protections — to be held, interrogated, or tortured outside U.S. legal jurisdiction. The program operated alongside the enhanced-interrogation program and was the operational mechanism by which prisoners reached secret CIA facilities and allied torture sites.
John Kiriakou has stated repeatedly that he was not personally in the rendition line of work — “kidnapping was not my thing at the agency; I didn’t work with the kidnappers” — but the program is the indirect cause of his federal felony conviction.[1][2][3]
Rendition versus extraordinary rendition
Kiriakou has repeatedly drawn the same distinction, with the destination country varying by telling. Ordinary rendition, he says, is simple: if a suspect with no legal status is caught in a third country, he is sent back to his own country to face justice there, even if that country will be rough on him. Extraordinary rendition is sending the same suspect instead to a country — he has named Algeria, Syria, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Libya, and Morocco in different interviews — where he will be secretly tortured for interrogation, with no public record of his whereabouts and no notice given to his home government.[4][5][6][7]
The Abu Omar case
The most consequential single rendition for Kiriakou’s own life is the CIA’s 2003 snatch of Abu Omar, a Muslim cleric in Milan, and his rendition to Egypt. In 2008, a journalist named Matthew Cole contacted Kiriakou claiming to be writing a book on the Abu Omar rendition. Cole showed Kiriakou a cover mock-up and asked him to identify contacts on two lists of names. Kiriakou said he knew none of them. Cole then referenced a person Kiriakou had mentioned by first name in his own book and asked if his name was John. Kiriakou confirmed the surname. “That was it. I confirmed the surname of a former colleague. That was it."[8][9]
"There really was no book”
Cole, Kiriakou later learned, was not writing a book on Abu Omar at all. He was secretly working as an investigator for Guantanamo defense attorneys, without disclosing that relationship. He passed the name to Human Rights Watch; Human Rights Watch passed it to the Guantanamo defense attorneys; the defense attorneys filed a classified motion asking a judge to order the officer to sit for a deposition; the Guantanamo judge flagged the name as classified; and the information was routed back through the FBI to the CIA to John Brennan.[10][11][12]
The name Kiriakou confirmed was never published or made public by anyone in the chain.[10]
Kiriakou notes that Italy separately prosecuted CIA officers in absentia — roughly sixteen people — over the same Abu Omar rendition from Milan.[13]
The rendition apparatus: secret prisons and handshake deals
Kiriakou has described the CIA’s original mission, per his old deputy director for operations, as simple: recruit spies, steal secrets, analyze them for policymakers. Immediately after 9/11, he says, the agency became a paramilitary organization, standing up in-house “assassination squads” under presidential executive order and running the torture, secret-prison, rendition, and extraordinary-rendition programs.[14] The secret prisons themselves existed in at least half a dozen countries, per Kiriakou, established through handshake deals between then-CIA Director George Tenet and the heads of those countries’ own intelligence services — often without the knowledge of the host countries’ presidents or prime ministers, who genuinely didn’t know the black sites existed on their own soil.[15]
He has also described watching a masked rendition team board a plane to take custody of a prisoner: one of them lifted his mask enough for Kiriakou to recognize a former boss. Neither side would tell the other where the prisoner was being taken — both cited the same “need to know” rule that walled off the CIA’s compartmentalized operations from each other.[16]
The Bahrain torture-chamber offer
Kiriakou served as the human-rights officer at the CIA station in Bahrain from 1994–1996. In that role, he produced the embassy’s annual human-rights report and confronted the Bahraini Minister of Interior on cases where security services beat pro-democracy demonstrators to death in custody. He has described the structural contradiction he witnessed there: an hour after his own visits, a CIA officer would arrive at the same minister with a different message — “If we give you $10 million, we want you to open up a secret torture chamber, disappear people into it, torture them, and give us a transcript of what they say.” Kiriakou’s framing: “What are they going to do? Listen to John the human-rights guy, or listen to the CIA guy with the suitcase full of $10 million in cash?”[17][18]
Mohamedou Ould Slahi — rendition gone wrong
The most-publicized case of an extraordinary rendition producing the wrong man is Mohamedou Ould Slahi, kidnapped from Mauritania at his cousin’s wedding and tortured for fourteen years before U.S. authorities concluded, per Kiriakou’s description: “Wrong guy, let him go.” The Dutch government granted Slahi citizenship; he now lectures graduate students in Kiriakou’s program at the University of Salamanca via Zoom.[19][20]
Maher Arar and the Army Field Manual loophole
Kiriakou cites the case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen pulled off a connecting flight at JFK Airport by the FBI at the CIA’s behest and sent to Syria, where he was tortured for eighteen months before Syrian officials concluded he was the wrong man — a case of mistaken identity. Arar later won a lawsuit in Canada; the Canadian government paid him ten million dollars, a settlement approved under Prime Minister Stephen Harper.[6][7][21]
Kiriakou says the post-torture-program deal struck between Congress and the Obama administration required even civilian agencies like the CIA and Homeland Security to follow the Army Field Manual’s interrogation rules. But because the Field Manual is only an executive-branch document rather than statute, he argues any future administration could reinstitute a rendition-and-torture program simply by rewriting the manual, without needing congressional approval.[22]
‘A cup of tea and an offer he couldn’t refuse’ (IRONCLAD)
John Kiriakou distinguishes a rendition — sending a captured Tunisian back to Tunisia — from an extraordinary rendition, sending him instead to Egypt or Syria, “handcuffed in a diaper with a suppository to knock you out.”[23][24] He recounts a defiant detainee captured in Karachi who ran the al-Qaeda training-manual playbook — feigning fainting and stomach pain — and told him “I’m not afraid of anything you can do to me.” Kiriakou answered, “our partners are going to make sure you’re afraid,” sent him to a third country, and the man “broke in two days and spilled everything.” Asked what they had done, a foreign officer said only, “we gave him a cup of tea and an offer he couldn’t refuse.”[25][26]