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 (258)

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The September 2004 memorandum from Daniel Levin to the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General provides an update on the status of interrogation advice. The memo includes previously given and current/pending advice for the CIA and DOD.
This legal memorandum from Steven Bradbury to John Rizzo examines the application of the War Crimes Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to certain techniques that may be used by the CIA to interrogate ...
This memorandum from Steven Bradbury to John Rizzo analyzes whether certain enhanced interrogation techniques used by the CIA in the interrogation of high value al Qaeda detainees would violate US law under Article 16. The memorandum concludes ...
This memorandum from Steven Bradbury to John Rizzo examines whether certain interrogation techniques can be used in the interrogation of high value al-Qaeda detainees. The memorandum concludes that none of these specific techniques, considered ...
This document is a letter from Daniel Levin to John Rizzo stating that the use of twelve interrogation techniques in the interrogation of Sharif al-Masri will not violate the U.S. constitution, statute, or other treaty obligation. Levin says ...
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 letter from Daniel Levin to John Rizzo is the Office of Legal Counsel's response to the proposed use of twelve interrogation techniques during the interrogation of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani and whether or not these techniques would violate U.S. ...
This memorandum from Assistant Attorney General John Bybee to John Rizzo provides the Office of the Assistant Attorney General's view on whether certain proposed conduct during the interrogation of al Qaeda Operative Abu Zubaydah would violate ...
This memorandum from the Office of the Assistant Attorney General to Alberto Gonzales examines the legal standards of conduct for interrogations under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment or Punishment.