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 (43)

Sworn statement of a detainee. States that following his capture, he was held for two and a half days in a box too small for him to stand. States, "I couldn't sleep in two days. They were playing very loud Western music, like rock music." States ...
Two (2) suspects in the theft from the Iraqi National Guard (ING) Training Camp at Camp Junction City, allege being abused while in custody. Both suspects provided facts "proven to be false and established patterns of not providing the truth". ...
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

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 ...

Summary of allegations by the Special Rapporteur of abuse of a detainee held in custody at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Base in 2002-2003. The claim of abuses included: prolonged standing; kneeling; painful and awkward positions; hooding; ...

Investigation into possible abuse in Tikrit, Iraq. A detainee alleged that he had been slapped in the face by an Iraqi interpreter during an interrogation and said that he had been held in a cramped cell with loud music, not allowed food, ...

Nov. 08, 2004
Investigative File (CID)
Physical assault, General, Cramped confinement, Dietary manipulation, Light or sound, Environmental manipulation

This report discusses an investigation into the alleged abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib Detention Facility. The investigation was ordered initially by LTG Ricardo S. Sanchez, Commander, Combined Joint Task Force Seven (CJTF-7). LTG Sanchez ...

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 ...