Hollywood has been instrumental in propagating images of Arabs and Muslims as terrorists – be it through dehumanizing caricatures or, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the United States, through more nuanced, yet, ahistorical representations. The American film industry has shown significantly less enthusiasm about screening the victimization of Arabs and Muslims through the Bush Administration’s War On Terror. One such film that tackles this thorny issue is Gavin Hood’s Rendition (2007), which puts “extraordinary rendition” or the U.S.-government-sanctioned kidnapping of unwanted subjects to secret prisons outside of U.S. territory, on screen. My paper investigates how Rendition imagines “nation” and the “West” as places for constructing identity and belonging. I am, in other words, interested in mapping how different notions of U.S. Americanness, Arabness, and Muslimness intersect and how they are negotiated in one of only a handful of U.S. American films that address this ugly side of U.S. state power. My paper argues that the film ultimately dislocates the practice of torture that is implicated in the practice of extraordinary rendition by casting Arabs and Muslims not only as victims of torture but as victimizers/torturers. By drawing from critical race theory, theories on nation-building, first-person narratives of former U.S. detainees, such as Murat Kurnaz’s Five Years of My Life, journalistic reports, and film reviews, my reading of Rendition embeds the film’s particular narrative within a larger cultural and political web of stories that make the film’s content possible in the first place. My investigation of Rendition is part of a larger inquiry into how “nation” and the “West” are defined in American films that depict terror, involve Arab and Muslim characters, and are based on concrete actual events. While other scholars have researched broader tendencies in U.S. film representations of Arabs and Muslims, I argue that, while there are, of course, patterns in representation and production, close readings of single films based on historical events help to unpack very specific assumptions about events and their relevance to national and Western identity formation. Close readings thereby in their detail, in my view, more effectively address the complexities involved in the already lengthy legacy of U.S. American representations of Arabs and Muslims.