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 (34)

This memo concerns the legal investigation and determination by the Air Force Office of Special Investigations following the discovery of photos depicting detainees bound, hooded and apparently abused while in custody. The photos were discovered ...

Statement of Sergeant First Class who served as an interrogator. Describes interrogations, and states that only specific interrogators conduct interrogations. Continues, "Our command has authorization to detain people longer than 72 ...

Statement of detainee captured by Special Forces and taken to a place that he believed belonged to the CIA. States that he was held in a box "one meter long and one meter high," given no food for three days, and prevented from sleeping by "loud ...
Report on an informal investigation conducted by Brigadier General Richard P. Formica into specific allegations of detainee abuse within CJSOTF-AP [Combined Joint Special Operating Task Force – Arabian Peninsula] and 5th SF [Special Forces] Group ...

This document is the Court Martial - charge and prosecution package for Specialist Charles A. Graner, Jr. of the 372nd Military Police Company. SPC Graner was a key figure in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and this document contains the ...

This letter is from Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal, two former Guantanamo detainees. The letter is on the letterhead of the Centre for Constitutional Rights and states that
Court Martial Records of SPC Megan Ambuhl, who did not participate in abuse of detainees, but pled guilty to Dereliction of Duty for not reporting the activities of MP and MI personnel at Abu Ghraib Prison. She was sentenced to forfeiture of 1/2 ...

Approximately 73-year-old Iraqi woman reported that she had been subjected to assault and sexual abuse, including being sodomized with a stick and touched in private areas; that she was forced to "swim" in water thrown on ...

Two NCOs and two enlisted men from B Company, 1/36th Infantry Regiment, 1st Armored Division severely assaulted several detained youths while the detainees' heads were covered with sandbags and their hands restrained with flexi-cuffs. The ...