By Sam Raphael, Ruth Blakeley and Crofton Black

An Investigation Into the CIA Torture Programme

CIA Torture Unredacted presents the findings from a four-year joint investigation by The Rendition Project and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism into the use of rendition, secret detention and torture by the CIA and its partners in the ‘War on Terror’. Between 2001 and 2009, the CIA established a global network of secret prisons (‘black sites’) for the purpose of detaining terrorism suspects, in secret and indefinitely, and interrogating them through the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The abuses which took place were severe, sustained, and in clear violation of domestic and international law. The perpetrators have never been held to account.

This report, and The Rendition Project’s website, provide the most detailed public account to date of the CIA torture programme. We move significantly beyond the findings of past investigations, including those published in heavily-redacted form by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) in December 2014. In the course of our work, we have:

→Revealed key material which was redacted from the SSCI Torture Report;→Unlocked the locational data from the thousands of CIA cables referenced by the Torture Report, allowing us to build a picture of where the torture of individual prisoners took place;

→Constructed datasets to enable cross-source analysis of detention times, locations and movements;

→Collated and published thousands of records relating to CIA rendition operations, including company invoices, pilot logs, landing records and aircraft communications data;

→Brought together multiple first-hand accounts of torture from former CIA prisoners; and→Compiled and indexed hundreds of declassified US Government documents, including many released after 2014.

Our analysis has enabled us to build an unprecedented picture of the programme from the ground up. We are publishing here:

→A detailed profile of the prisoners held within the torture programme, including their nationalities; capture locations and dates; detention locations, dates and treatment; and fate and whereabouts afterwards;

→The identity of those prisoners held in the black sites in Thailand, Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Morocco, and Guantánamo Bay;

→A detailed reconstruction of the shifting geography of secret detention operations in Afghanistan;

→A granular account of the complex network of companies which provided aircraft to the CIA for rendition operations;

→Extensive documentary evidence relating to over 60 rendition circuits by these aircraft, which involved over 120 individual renditions;

→A detailed overview of complicity by a number of key states, including the United Kingdom and those which hosted the black sites.

CIA Torture Unredacted stands as a comprehensive public account of one of the most disturbing elements of the ‘War on Terror’: a global programme of systematic disappearance and torture, carried out by the world’s most powerful liberal democratic states. In the face of continued obstruction and denial by the governments involved, which refuse to allow for a full accounting of the crimes which took place, we hope that this report will stand as a central reference point for all those who still seek redress and reparations for the victims of CIA torture, as well as some measure of the truth for us all.