Singing an Extraordinary Rendition

[edward]

From the off going off topic point on the Portlandia thread I read this.

References
The term fink was originally underworld slang for an informer. It derives from the German word for "finch" -- i.e. one who "sings" -- and is comparable to a "stool pigeon". A ratfink is an intensified version of a "fink. By the time Roth used this name for a character, the term had started to pass into more general usage.

I have often pondered if perhaps the CIA's infamous term extraordinary rendition was related to making a prisoner sing, as it was called back in the day, and to make that song an extraordinary rendition.

Google comes nearly up blank on this, yet I don't really feel that I am speculating. Using really rough tactics in the early 20th century was common. That is also when the term sing also became common.

"Third Degree" Practices of the past page 4.

‘‘Third-Degree’’ Practices of the Past
From the late nineteenth century through the 1930s,
American police occasionally employed ‘‘third-degree’’
methods of interrogation—inflicting physical or mental
pain and suffering to extract confessions and other types of
information from crime suspects. These techniques ranged
from the direct and explicit use of physical assaults to
tactics that were both physically and psychologically
coercive to lesser forms of duress. Among the most commonly
used ‘‘third-degree’’ techniques were physical
violence (e.g., beating, kicking, or mauling suspects); torture
(e.g., simulating suffocation by holding a suspect’s
head in water, putting lighted cigars or pokers against a
suspect’s body); hitting suspects with a rubber hose (which
seldom left marks); prolonged incommunicado confinement;
deprivations of sleep,

http://www.albany.edu/scj/documents/KassinetalWP.pdf

 

[256bits]

From what I gather,

rendition,
This is a legal term.
When it came into regular useage is difficult to pinpoint.

Rendition is a legal term meaning "surrender" or "turn over", particularly from one jurisdiction to another, and applies to property as well as persons. For criminal suspects, extradition is the most common type of rendition. Rendition can also be seen as the act of handing over, after the request for extradition has taken place.

Rendition can also mean the act of rendering, i.e. delivering, a judicial decision, or of explaining a series of events, as a defendant or witness. It can also mean the execution of a judicial order by the directed parties.

Rendition between states is required by Article Four, Section Two of the United States Constitution; this section is often termed the rendition clause.

http://martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/rendition2.html
A blog, but the easiest to follow along with.

'Extraordinary rendition' then relates to an extradition not following the proper legal channels, and in some cases using ilegal activities to capture and transfer the subject from one jurisdiction to another, hence the term 'extraordinary'.

What you wrote, though, does seem to have an element of parallelism in meaning ...
Quite interesting indeed.

PS. I should add this, just to make it complete with a wiki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendition_(law )