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 (145)

RelevanceDateRelease Date
Sept. 02, 2005 | ACLU-RDI 6505
N/A
Dec. 30, 2004 | ACLU-RDI 6390
This document is the first page of a memorandum concerning government responsibilities relating to torture under the U.N. Convention Against Torture (CAT) and 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A.
June 15, 2011
Legal Memo
James B. Comey
Nov. 04, 2004 | DOA | ACLU-RDI 6385
This document is a letter from the US Army trial counsel responsible for prosecuting Specialist [redacted] and Sergeant [redacted] "in connection with detainee abuse at the Baghdad Central Confinement Facility." The letter mentions a New York ...
Oct. 21, 2004 | ACLU-RDI 6384
This document is a memo regarding an investigation into allegations of detainee abuse. Investigation was initiated due to a letter from a detainee, alleging that he was "taken from Camp Cropper to an unknown location during the beginning of Jun ...
Feb. 22, 2005 | FBI | ACLU-RDI 6335
The document is an internal FBI memorandum, regarding Department of Justice protocol for the investigation of terrorism overseas. The memorandum includes information about the standards for the handling of a criminal case in a battlefield zone, ...
| ACLU-RDI 6295
The document is a memorandum regarding potentially relevant federal criminal statutes, including jurisdictional statutes and substantive statutes.
DOJ | ACLU-RDI 6286
The document is a monograph written by the U.S. Department of Justice's Counterterrorism Section on the fundamental principles governing extraterritorial prosecutions, including jurisdiction, venue, and procedural rights. The monograph includes ...
Apr. 30, 2005 | FBI | ACLU-RDI 6201
The document is an internal FBI memorandum from the FBI General Counsel, regarding legal advice and opinions about the treatment of prisoners and detainees by FBI personnel. The memorandum is almost entirely redacted, but includes information on ...
Jan. 15, 2010
Legal Memo
Gary M. Bald, Valerie E. Caproni
Nov. 03, 2004 | FBI | ACLU-RDI 5995
The document is an internal FBI memorandum sent from the General Counsel to all divisions, regarding an appropriate course of action in response to requests received from military criminal investigative services to interview FBI personnel ...
Legal Memo
FBI General Counsel
Sept. 07, 2007 | DOS | ACLU-RDI 5908
This DOS Cable from U.S. Geneva Mission to DOS Washington contains a letter from Special Rapporteurs regarding the health and detention conditions of Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility detainees, and specifically, Samil al-Haj, a national of Sudan ...
Oct. 28, 2011
Legal Memo, Cable, Letter
Samil Al-Haj