On June 13, 2016 the CIA released 50 documents related to the Bush-era interrogation and detention policies as a result of a Freedom Of Information Act request made by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Though these documents contain few new revelations (many of the sensational aspects were summarized in this 2014 article), they nonetheless allow us to see what the CIA was doing and thinking in the words of the agency’s own staff. The portrait these documents paint of a bureaucracy mandating calculated mental and physical abuse that frequently got out of hand is deeply disturbing.

The 50 documents are freely available on the CIA’s website, but their contents are often opaque and it’s hard to know where to find the most interesting details. Some documents are so heavily redacted only a few sentences are visible, while others contains dozens of pages of text.

This article is meant as a comprehensive guide to the contents of those documents so that you can explore them at your convenience. The articles are sorted into the topic they pertain to, and include a direct link to the source document. There is also a link for downloading all 50 documents in one single ZIP file.


posted 2844 days ago