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 (42)

RelevanceDateRelease Date
June 10, 2004 | CID | ACLU-RDI 14

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 ...

Dec. 30, 2004
Investigative File (CID), Photograph
Jacqueline J. Scott, Nelson van Eck, Thom Jones
Use of water, Other, Physical assault, Sexual, General, Cramped confinement, Use of phobias, Isolation, Dietary manipulation, Environmental manipulation, Light or sound, Hooding/Goggling, Other Humiliation, Sexual
June 03, 2004 | CID | ACLU-RDI 9

Detainee alleged that U.S. forces captured him and took him to Dhyla Al Mokhadia Base, an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps location, where he was deprived of food and water for three days with his hands tied and eyes blindfolded.  He alleged ...

Dec. 30, 2004
Investigative File (CID)
John Peterson, Jacqueline J. Scott
Physical assault, General, Dietary manipulation, Environmental manipulation, Hooding/Goggling