After September 11, 2001, U.S. officials authorized the cruel treatment and torture of prisoners held in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo, and the CIA's secret prisons overseas.

This database documents the U.S. government's official experiment with torture. At present, the database contains well over 100,000 pages of government documents obtained primarily through Freedom of Information Act litigation and requests filed by the ACLU, and through litigation of Salim v. Mitchell, a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of the survivors and the family of a dead victim of the CIA torture program. To learn more about the database, please read the About and Search Help pages. If you're a developer, you can also access this data through our API.

Search Result (77)

This transcript is of a hearing held before the Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties to examine the OLC's involvement in the legal review of Administration policies regarding detention and ...
This July 22, 2004 letter from Daniel Levin to Scott Muller asks Muller to provide a "precise description" of the waterboard interrogation technique, so that the OLC can determine if it is consistent with 18 USC §§ 2340 and 2340A.
Aug. 31, 2016
Letter
Daniel B. Levin
Scott W. Muller
Scott W. Muller, Daniel B. Levin
SERE, Use of water, Waterboarding
A letter from the CIA to OLC requesting that the OLC reaffirm its analyses in several previously issued memos relating to interrogation. The letter states that "we rely on the applicable law and OLC guidance to assess the lawfulness of detention ...
This National Security Council memo discusses the use of the CIA's proposed EITs in the interrogation of high-value al Qaeda detainees. The memo divides the proposed EITs into two categories, "conditioning" and "corrective" and concludes that ...
This National Security Council memo summarizes the OLC's three May 2005 opinions for the CIA on the legality of its interrogation techniques.
This legal memorandum from Steven Bradbury to John Rizzo examines the application of the War Crimes Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to certain techniques that may be used by the CIA to interrogate ...
N/A
June 13, 2016
Non-legal Memo
SERE
This document, prepared by the Chief of Medical Services, summarizes and reflects upon the rendition, detention and interrogation program. The findings include that in a particular no evidence was found that the use of waterboard produced ...