Torture in the United States

Torture in the United States includes cases of torture reported in the United States and outside the country by U.S. government workers.

Torture and the War on Terror

A hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib prison who was told he would be electrocuted if he fell off the box.

The United States and other countries involved in the War on Terror have used torture to get information from suspected terrorists. Some of the best-known cases of torture involving the United States are the Abu Ghraib scandal and Guantanamo Bay.

Abu Ghraib Prison

Starting in 2004 there were reports that American soldiers had abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. In May 2004 a New Yorker article described the abuse and included pictures taken by the torturers. According to an investigation by the Department of Defense called the Taguba Report, the military had been investigating the abuse since 2003. Eventually nine soldiers were discharged from the military and sent to prison.

Guantanamo Bay

Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have said CIA agents used waterboarding and other inhumane methods to get information out of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Because of the abuse, President Barack Obama ordered the base to be closed down.

Slavery

See the main article: Slavery in the United States

Before the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in 1865, black people were enslaved throughout the United States.

People living as slaves were controlled by legally authorized violence. On large plantations, slave overseers were allowed to whip and brutalize noncompliant slaves. Slave codes authorized, indemnified, or even required the use of violence. Abolitionists criticized the codes' brutality.

Slaves and free Blacks were regulated by the Black Codes (United States). Their movements were controlled by patrollers and slave catchers: conscripts from the white population who were allowed to use summary punishment against escaped slaves. Maiming or killing escapees was allowed.

Lynching

See the main article: Lynching in the United States

Lynching is "the public killing of a person who has not received any due process." Lynchings took place in all but four states, but happened most often in the Southern United States' Cotton Belt. They were most common from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries.

Carried out by crowds of people, lynchings were used as a form of mob violence and social control. For example, many lynching victims were black men who were accused of having sex with white women. Torturing and murdering them publicly was a way to terrorize other black men into having relationships only with other African Americans. The victims also included black men who were accused of acting uppity (not obedient enough) towards white people, assaulting them, having sex with them, or raping them. By killing these men, lynch mobs warned every black person in the area that they could be killed for disobeying social rules.

Victims got no trial or chance to defend themselves before they were lynched. They were mutilated, tortured, and murdered (usually by hanging and burning). Forms of violence and torture also included genital mutilation, strangulation, and maiming or severing limbs.

Most lynchings were inspired by unsolved crime, racism, and innuendo. Police, lawmakers, and (later) federal agents were frequently complicit in lynching while affiliated with Ku Klux Klan groups, releasing prisoners to lynch mobs and/or refusing to prosecute the people who committed a public act of murder. Despite numerous attempts, federal anti-lynching legislation was consistently defeated. The United States finally recognized lynching as a federal hate crime in 2022.

There is documentation about the lynchings of 4,743 people in the United States between 1882 and 1968. Of these, 3,446 were African Americans. There were likely many more victims during and after this period whose murders were not reported. This influenced the Great Migration of 6.5 million African Americans away from southern states.

A lynching site found in Noxubee County, Mississippi, a location central to regional mob violence, shows that lynching was still being used as a torture method in the 1970s.

Torture abroad during the Cold War

American officials were involved in counter-insurgency programs in which they encouraged their allies, such as the ARVN, to use torture. Additionally, they actively participated in torture during the 1960s to the 1980s.

From 1967 to at least 1972, the Central Intelligence Agency coordinated the Phoenix Program, which targeted the infrastructure of the Communist National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam ("Viet Cong"). The program killed 26,000 Viet Cong and captured over 60,000. Critics argued that many of the victims were civilians, not Viet Cong, but were nevertheless tortured by the South Vietnamese Army under CIA supervision.

During the 1970s and 1980s, as part of Operation Condor, American officials supported the internal security apparatus of the regimes in South America's southern cone while those regimes carried out kidnappings, "disappearances", torture, and assassinations. The United States provided similar support to right-wing governments in Central America, particularly in the 1980s. Many people who participated in these abuses were trained by the U.S. Army School of the Americas.

In San Salvador, El Salvador's capital city, Americans were present as supervisors at Mariona Prison, which was well known for a wide variety of forms of torture. One author, Jennifer Harbury, concluded:

A review of the materials [about Central America] leads relentlessly to just one conclusion: that the CIA and related U.S. intelligence agencies have since their [creation] engaged in the widespread practice of torture, either directly or through well-paid proxies.

In 2014, a report by Brazil's National Truth Commission asserted that the United States government taught torture techniques to the Brazilian military government of 1964–85.