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 (42)

RelevanceDateRelease Date
June 29, 2004 | CID | ACLU-RDI 121

Investigation into possible abuse in Tikrit, Iraq. A detainee alleged that he had been slapped in the face by an Iraqi interpreter during an interrogation and said that he had been held in a cramped cell with loud music, not allowed food, ...

Nov. 08, 2004
Investigative File (CID)
Physical assault, General, Cramped confinement, Dietary manipulation, Light or sound, Environmental manipulation
July 15, 2004 | CID | ACLU-RDI 124

Investigation into a recordable compact disc containing images of suspected detainee abuse in in Afghanistan between January 11 and January 19, 2004. The images on the CD depicted U.S. soldiers holding weapons on hooded and bound local ...

Nov. 08, 2004
Investigative File (CID)
Physical assault, Threat, Assault/death, Environmental manipulation, Hooding/Goggling