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 (7)

Criminal Investigation Command (CID) report into allegations of assault, cruelty and maltreatment of a detainee by guards at Abu Ghraib. Among the detainee's allegations, he stated that a US Army Sergeant hung him by his arms from the bars of a ...

An investigation into alleged aggravated assault, cruelty, and maltreatment of an Iraqi prisoner by U.S. forces.  The detainee stated that he was held at the "Disco" (a detention facility in Mosul, Iraq) for approximately one ...

General Bantz J. Craddock, Commander United States Southern Command, ordered an AR 15-6 investigation into alleged instances of abuse at Guantanamo. He appointed Brigadier General John T. Furlow and Lieutenant General Randall M. Schmidt to ...

An OLC memo from Bradbury to Rizzo addressing whether the combined use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (including waterboarding) violates the prohibition on torture. The memo concludes that it would not violate the torture statute if used ...
This report details the investigation into the death of Gul Rahman. This re-released report includes a description of psychologist Bruce Jessen and his role in the interrogation of Gul Rahman. A version of this document was re-released in ...

A series of blog posts by a former OLC lawyer, Marty Lederman, discussing the difference between the DOJ's memo on torture from August 2002 and the memo on torture from December 30, 2004 (ACLU-RDI 3547).  The posts conclude that the Bush ...