Jurisdiction as a Weapon

This book examines how the United States and multiple collaborating governments constructed a transnational detention architecture designed to operate in the gaps between legal systems, not as an emergency improvisation, but as a deliberate institutional strategy to place interrogation practices beyond the reach of enforceable domestic or international law. Three systemic mechanisms define the program's structural logic. First, the geographic distribution of black sites across countries including Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, and Thailand reveals a deliberate form of sovereignty arbitrage: the outsourcing of coercive interrogation to jurisdictions where accountability structures were weak, absent, or politically subordinated to security cooperation with Washington. The network subjected detainees to practices such as waterboarding, walling, forced nudity, and prolonged sleep deprivation, while internal bureaucratic language reframed these methods as "enhanced interrogation techniques," embedding legal insulation directly into operational terminology. Second, the involvement of contracted psychologists in designing and implementing interrogation procedures demonstrates how states can externalize moral and legal liability through privatization, creating additional layers of separation between policymakers and operational conduct. Third, investigations by the European Parliament concluded that several European governments cooperated with CIA rendition operations, including the hosting of black sites in Poland and Romania. These findings revealed that the system of juridical evasion depended not only on American intelligence structures, but also on broader international complicity that weakened the credibility of democratic oversight and rule-of-law institutions.