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 (335)

This CID investigation concerns an allegation of a assault upon a detainee while at Baghdad International Airport (BIAP). Detainee alleged that he was assaulted by a black man dressed in an army uniform and was "slapped around" for ten (10) days ...
Oct. 01, 2008
Investigative File (CID)
Physical assault, Face slap or insult slap, General, Environmental manipulation, Hooding/Goggling
Detainee reported that he was arrested after US forces found a weapon in his home. He was detained at Al Sijood Palace, Iraq, and it was during this detention he states he was hooded; flexicuffed; punched; kicked; yelled at; and threatened. ...
CID investigation into allegations of prisoner maltreatment/abuse at Camp Cropper, Iraq. The investigation established probable cause to believe that eleven (11) members of the Military Police assigned to Camp Cropper engaged in cruelty and ...
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 ...

A detainee claims that he was in a vehicle with other Iraqi men who possessed AK-47s. The men attempted to avoid a road-side checkpoint and were stopped by US gunfire. While the men were detained at the roadside, several Iraqi civilians began to ...
Detainee alleged that while at Abu Ghraib prison several soldiers slapped; punched; choked; struck his head, shoulders, and arms with a retractable metal baton; jumped on him; forced him to lean against a wall in a seated position; forced him to ...

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 ...