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 (27)

A letter providing legal advice regarding whether the conditions of detention at certain oversears CIA facilities are consistent with the applicable standards of the DTA.  It concludes that the conditions of confinement did not constitute ...

Summary of OLC legal advice to the Counsel to the President, the CIA, and the DoD regarding the CIA's and DoD's interrogation programs. [OLC Vaughn Index # 159]

Lengthy, but almost entirely redacted, document that apparently discusses the CIA’s detention and interrogation program for “high value targets.” The document provides some detail regarding the “standard” and ...

Email includes news articles about high level detainees, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah and the "harsh" interrogation methods the CIA employs. The email includes another article, which reports specific accounts of abuse.

This August 1, 2002 OLC memo from Jay Bybee to John Rizzo discusses whether certain proposed conduct in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah would violate the prohibition against torture found at Section 2340A of title 18 of the U.S. Code. The memo ...
This June 2002 cable reports on a meeting held to discuss the next phase of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation. Attendees include psychologist James Mitchell. At the meeting, it was agreed upon that Abu Zubaydah was withholding information on direct ...
Cable
CTC/UBL
James Mitchell
Abu Zubaydah
SERE, Isolation, Dietary manipulation, Other