The Torture Report

"A chilling account of the use and justification of torture by the Bush Administration, made the more powerful by its dispassionate, forensic language." —Salman Rushdie

"The Torture Report is a definitive and often stirring rebuke to those who are still publishing books and touring the country claiming their 'enhanced interrogations' worked and were not torture. Reconstructing, directly from the documentary record, scenes from Guantanamo, secret CIA prisons, and foreign dungeons, Siems manages both to prove the torture apologists wrong and to give voice to the two groups of people they don't want us to hear: those who were tortured, and those in the military and intelligence services who said no to torture from the start. We all should know these powerful, appalling, and sometimes heroic stories." —Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director, ACLU

Sometimes the truth is buried in front of us. That is the case with more than 140,000 government documents relating to abuse of prisoners by U.S. forces during the “war on terror,” brought to light by Freedom of Information Act litigation. As the lead author of the ACLU’s report on these documents, Larry Siems is in a unique position to chronicle who did what, to whom and when. This book, written with the pace and intensity of a thriller, serves as a tragic reminder of what happens when commitments to law, common sense, and human dignity are cast aside, when it becomes difficult to discern the difference between two groups intent on perpetrating extreme violence on their fellow human beings.


Divided into three sections, The Torture Report presents a stunning array of eyewitness and first-person reports—by victims, perpetrators, dissenters, and investigators—of the CIA’s White House-orchestrated interrogations in illegal, secret prisons around the world; the Pentagon’s “special projects,” in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; plots real and imagined, and much more.