A growing collection of documents from within the CIA torture programme, including memos, internal reports and cables from a number of secret prisons (black sites) where detainees were held outside the law and subjected to systematic torture.
Established in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, the CIA torture programme formed a central plank of the US-led ‘war on terror’ during the Bush administration. Between 2001 and 2009, the CIA established and ran a global network of secret prisons (so-called ‘black sites’) for the purposes of detaining and interrogating terrorism suspects – in secret, indefinitely, and under the most extreme conditions. As a result, scores of men were kidnapped and disappeared into the programme, held incommunicado for weeks, months or years on end, and subjected to the systematic use of brutal interrogation techniques which clearly amounted to torture.
A number of different organisations and journalists have, over the years, sought to force the CIA and other US government agencies to release documents relating to the torture programme. Of particular note, the American Civil Liberties Union and the journalist Jason Leopold have both filed a series of Freedom of Information requests, and subsequently litigated these with some success. In addition, a lawsuit filed against the psychologists contracted by the CIA to design and oversee the torture programme, James Elmer Mitchell and John ‘Bruce’ Jessen, on behalf of three former prisoners resulted in the disclosure of hundreds of additional records.
This collection brings together the combined results of these efforts, and contains a range of different document types, including cables between CIA headquarters and individual black sites authorising and discussing the use of torture on specific detainees; reports from the CIA’s internal auditor, the Office of Inspector General, in relation to allegations of torture; memos from the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel providing authorisation for the use of specific forms of torture; and a number of emails, PowerPoint presentations, memos and other documents authored by the CIA.
