Shedding new light on a chapter of the US "war on terror" that has largely remained shrouded in secrecy, the Open Society Justice Initiative released a report Tuesday detailing the cases of 136 individuals who were extraordinarily rendered or secretly detained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Entitled “Globalizing Torture: CIA secret detention and extraordinary rendition”, the report confirms that the CIA held suspected terrorists in undisclosed prisons, known as “black sites”.

The agency also carried out “extraordinary renditions” – defined by the report as the illegal transfer of a detainee to the custody of a foreign government for detention or interrogation.