In her article, ‘Measuring extraordinary rendition and international cooperation’, Rebecca Cordell seeks to subject the Rendition Flights Database to a model-based, statistical analysis. She argues that her analysis suggests that more countries were involved in the CIA’s rendition programme than our work has previously established, and that many more flights in the database are likely to be connected to rendition operations than we have identified. While we would not dispute the likelihood that both of these statements are correct, and we have always presented our findings with an acknowledgement that they provide a necessarily limited account of the rendition, detention and interrogation (RDI) programme, we suggest that Cordell’s work should be approached with some caution. This is so for two reasons. First, her findings – although derived through a different mode of analysis from our own – do not appear to move beyond those we have already published. Second, because Cordell has not triangulated her analysis with either data relating to transfers of specific prisoners, or with evidence relating to which countries hosted prisons for the CIA and the operational dates for these prisons, we question her claim that the flights she has identified from the Database are ‘likely rendition flights’. We aim to demonstrate the importance of having a clear understanding of the limitations of big data when researching violations of human rights, especially where such data is related to covert operations. We also seek to show why the Renditions Flights Database only has merit when it is triangulated with a wide range of supplementary sources, including first-hand accounts by prisoners themselves, declassified documents from the US Government, and the findings of parliamentary, journalist and legal investigations. It is this process of triangulation which gives the flight data meaning and which makes it of value for establishing the facts of human rights abuses.

中文翻译：

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人权实况调查和中央情报局的引渡、拘留和审讯计划：对科德尔的回应

在她的文章“衡量非凡的引渡和国际合作”中，Rebecca Cordell 试图对引渡航班数据库进行基于模型的统计分析。她争辩说，她的分析表明，参与中央情报局引渡计划的国家比我们之前确定的要多，而且数据库中的航班可能比我们确定的要多得多。虽然我们不会质疑这两个陈述都是正确的，而且我们总是承认我们的调查结果提供了对引渡、拘留和审讯 (RDI) 计划的必然有限的说明，但我们建议 Cordell 的工作应该谨慎对待。之所以如此，有两个原因。第一的，她的发现——尽管是通过与我们不同的分析模式得出的——似乎并没有超越我们已经发表的那些。其次，因为 Cordell 没有使用与特定囚犯转移相关的数据或与哪些国家为中央情报局托管监狱以及这些监狱的运营日期相关的证据对她的分析进行三角测量，我们质疑她的说法，即她确定的航班来自数据库是“可能的引渡航班”。我们旨在证明在研究侵犯人权行为时清楚了解大数据局限性的重要性，尤其是在此类数据与秘密行动相关的情况下。我们还试图说明为什么 Renditions Flights Database 只有在与广泛的补充来源进行三角测量时才具有价值，包括囚犯自己的第一手资料、美国政府解密的文件以及议会、记者和法律调查的结果。正是这种三角测量过程赋予了飞行数据意义，并使其对于确定侵犯人权的事实具有价值。