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 (6709)

This document is a CIA Memo drafted for the Deputy Director for Operations via the Associate Deputy Director for Operations/Counterintelligence. The previous release of this document (on June 13, 2016) included more redactions such as Bruce ...
This November 27, 2007 memo justifies the future use of contractors as High Value Detainee Interrogators (HVDI). The memo states that before September 11, 2001 the CIA had no resident expertise in interrogation and therefore contract ...
This memo describes the "key" role that contract interrogators/debriefers play in the CIA's Rendition and Detention Program. The memo states that before September 11, 2001 the CIA had no resident expertise in interrogation, and so they sought ...
Dec. 20, 2016
Non-legal Memo
EIT, SERE
This email includes a list of Office of Technical Service (OTS) officers involved in the Detention, Rendition or Interrogation of terrorists since September 11, 2001. The list includes James Mitchell and John (Bruce) Jessen.
Dec. 20, 2016
Chart/List, Email
Bruce Jessen, James Mitchell
This cable includes the bios of the detainees and lists the EITs they were subjected to while they were in CIA custody. It is redacted almost in full with the exception of information on the following three detainees: Suleiman Abdullah, Gul ...
This October 23, 2006 email includes a cable describing Abu Zubaydah's current condition in isolation and observations of a rehearsal of the next phase of Abu Zubaydah's interrogations, which included the use of confinement boxes and the water ...
Dec. 20, 2016
Email, Cable
Abu Zubaydah
Use of water, Waterboarding, Cramped confinement, Isolation
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 memo discusses and summarizes the OLC opinions issued in 2002 and 2003 about the legal standards for interrogations of detainees.
Aug. 31, 2016
Legal Memo, Non-legal Memo
Abu Zubaydah
EIT
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 ...