American Torture Methods

There are cases, both documented and alleged, that involve the usage of torture by members of the United States government, military, law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, healthcare services, and other public organizations both in and out of the country.

Torture is illegal in the United States. The United States came under scrutiny for controversial practices, both from foreign and domestic sources, following the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

After the U.S. dismissed United Nations concerns about torture in 2006, one UK judge observed 'America's idea of what is torture ... does not appear to coincide with that of most civilized nations'.

While the term "torture" has a variety of definitions and cultural contexts, this article addresses only those practices qualifying as torture under the definition of that term articulated in the codified law (primarily statutory) and case law of the United States.''See'' article on precising definition.

The Human Rights Measurement Initiative gives the U.S. a score of 3.6 out of 10 for the right to freedom from torture and ill-treatment.

Legislation, regulation, and treaties regarding torture

There is no federal criminal statute against torture specifically within the U.S.^{:paragraph 13} There is a federal criminal statute against committing torture ''outside'' the U.S. However, according to the Committee Against Torture, "despite the occurrence of cases of
extraterritorial torture of detainees, no prosecutions have been initiated under the extraterritorial criminal torture statute"^{:paragraph 13} There is a federal criminal statute against assault and battery within the U.S., and torture would fall under this, but torture is more than mere assault and battery. There is also a federal law ''defining'' torture. There are state laws outlawing torture. Torture is also a violation of international law per the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT). It is a "crime against humanity", and this has "universal jurisdiction". However, outside of the "universal jurisdiction" potential avenue for prosecution (i.e. some other country prosecute acts of torture committed by the U.S. Government), there is no practical method of enforcement for torture committed by the U.S. as a violation of international law. This is because the U.S. is a signatory of the Rome Statute and is not party to the International Criminal Court. The UN Security Council (UNSC) can recommend cases to the ICC, but the U.S. can, as one of the five permanent members of the UNSC, veto the recommendation.

Prohibition under domestic law

Bill of Rights

Torture as a punishment falls under the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The text of the Amendment states that:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held since at least the 1890s that punishments which involved torture are forbidden under the Eighth Amendment.

18 U.S.C. § 2340 (the "Torture Act")

An act of torture committed outside the United States by a U.S. national or a non-U.S. national who is present in the United States is punishable under . The definition of torture used is as follows:

Military Commissions Act of 2006

In October 2006, the United States enacted the Military Commissions Act of 2006, authorizing the President to conduct military tribunals of enemy combatants and to hold them indefinitely without judicial review under the terms of ''habeas corpus''. Testimony coerced through humiliating or degrading treatment would be admissible in the tribunals. Amnesty International and others have criticized the Act for approving a system that uses torture, destroying the mechanisms for judicial review created by ''Hamdan v. Rumsfeld'', and creating a parallel legal system below international standards. Part of the act was an amendment that retroactively rewrote the War Crimes Act, effectively making policymakers (i.e., politicians and military leaders), and those applying policy (i.e., Central Intelligence Agency interrogators and U.S. soldiers), no longer subject to legal prosecution under U.S. law for what, before the amendment, was defined as a war crime, such as torture. Because of that, critics describe the MCA as an amnesty law for crimes committed during the War on Terror.

U.S. Army Field Manuals

In late 2006, the military issued updated U.S. Army Field Manuals on intelligence collection
FM 2-22.3. Human Intelligence Collector Operations
September 2006) and counterinsurgency
FM 3-24. Counterinsurgency
December 2006). Both manuals reiterated that "no person in the custody or under the control of DOD, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, in accordance with and as defined in U.S. law." Specific techniques prohibited in the intelligence collection manual include:
* Forcing the detainee to be naked, perform sexual acts, or pose in a sexual manner;
* Hooding, that is, placing hoods or sacks over the head of a detainee; using duct tape over the eyes;
* Applying beatings, electric shock, burns, or other forms of physical pain;
* Waterboarding;
* Using military working dogs;
* Inducing hypothermia or heat injury;
* Conducting mock executions;
* Depriving the detainee of necessary food, water, sleep, or medical care.

Prohibition under international law

Torture in all forms is banned by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which the United States participated in drafting. The United States is a party to the following international treaties that prohibits torture, such as the 1949 Geneva Conventions (signed 1949; ratified 1955), the American Convention on Human Rights (signed 1977), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (signed 1977; ratified 1992), and the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (signed 1988; ratified 1994). It has neither signed nor ratified the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture.
International law defines torture during an armed conflict as a war crime. It also mandates that any person involved in ordering, allowing, and even insufficiently preventing and prosecuting war crimes is criminally liable under the command responsibility doctrine.

Historical practices of torture

Slavery

People living as slaves were regulated both in their service and when walking in public by legally authorized violence. On large plantations, slave overseers were authorized to whip and brutalize noncompliant slaves. Slave codes authorized, indemnified or even required the use of violence and were long criticized by abolitionists for their brutality. Slaves as well as free Blacks were regulated by the Black Codes, and had their movements regulated by patrollers and slave catchers, conscripted from the white population, who were allowed to use summary punishment against escapees, which included maiming or killing them.

Lynching

Lynching was a public act of murder, torture, and mutilation carried out by crowds, primarily against African Americans. A form of mob violence and social control, usually involving (but by no means restricted to) the illegal hanging and burning of suspected criminals, lynch law cast its pall over the Southern United States from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. Victims were usually black men, often accused of acting uppity (being insolent) towards, assaulting, having sex with, or raping white people.

The documented murders of 4,743 people who were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968 were not often publicized. It is likely that many more unrecorded lynchings occurred during and after this period which influenced The Great Migration of 6.5 million African Americans away from southern states. A 1970s lynching site found in Noxubee County, Mississippi, a location central to regional mob violence, belies the continuation of lynching as a torture method.

Most lynchings were inspired by unsolved crime, racism, and innuendo. Three-and-a-half thousand of its victims were African Americans. Lynchings took place in every state except four, but were concentrated in the Cotton Belt. Forms of violence and torture also included genital mutilation, strangulation, maiming and the severing of limbs. Both police and lawmakers, and later federal agents, were frequently complicit in lynching while affiliated with Ku Klux Klan groups, releasing prisoners to lynch crowds and/or refusing to prosecute the participants in a public act of murder. Despite numerous attempts to do so, federal anti-lynching legislation was consistently defeated. In 2022, lynching became recognized as a federal hate crime in the United States.

"Third degree"

The use of " third degree interrogation" techniques in order to compel confession, ranging from "psychological duress such as prolonged confinement to extreme violence and torture", was widespread and considered acceptable in early American policing. In 1910 the direct application of physical violence in order to force a confession became a media issue and some courts began to deny obviously compelled confessions. In response to this, "''covert'' third degree torture" became popular, since it left no signs of physical abuse. The publication of the Wickersham Commission's "Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement" in 1931 highlighted the widespread use of covert third degree torture by the police to force confessions, and led to a subsequent decline in its use over the 1930s and 1940s.

World War II

During World War II, the U.S. military interrogated high-level Nazis at a secret camp, " P. O. Box 1142," outside Washington, D.C. The interrogators did not use physical torture, but did use psychological tricks, like threatening to turn the prisoner over to the Soviets.

Some captured German U-boat crewmen were subjected to "shock interrogation" techniques, including exhausting physical exercise and beatings, after their capture during Operation Teardrop.

After the war, in 1948, the United States Air Force invited German Luftwaffe interrogator Hanns Scharff to brief them on his interrogation techniques, which did not use physical means to obtain information.

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, and actively participated in it, 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 of the program assert that many of those identified by the program as Viet Cong members were actually civilians, who when captured suffered torture by the South Vietnamese Army, under CIA supervision.

American trainers and intelligence coordination officials supported the internal security apparatus of the regimes of South America's southern cone as those regimes carried out kidnappings, " disappearances", torture and assassinations during the 1970s and 1980s as part of Operation Condor. Similar support was provided to right-wing governments of Central America, particularly in the 1980s. Numerous participants in these abuses were trained by the U.S. Army School of the Americas. Americans were present as supervisors in the Mariona Prison in San Salvador, El Salvador, well known for a wide variety of forms of torture.Miles Schuman,
Abu Ghraib: the rule, not the exception
," ''Globe and Mail'' (Toronto), May 14, 2004. One author, Jennifer Harbury, focussing on Central America, concluded that "A review of the materials leads relentlessly to just one conclusion: that the CIA and related U.S. intelligence agencies have since their inception 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 was involved in teaching torture techniques to the Brazilian military government of 1964–85.Adam Taylor (10 December 2014)
Brazil's torture report brings a president to tears
''The Washington Post''. Retrieved 12 December 2014.

Torture by countries with U.S. training – post-World War II to 1975

Source: Chomsky, Noam, Herman, Edward S. ''The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism'', Spokesman (1979), , pg 361.

U.S. intelligence training manuals

The Torture Manuals was a nickname for seven training manuals that had excerpts declassified to the public on September 20, 1996, by the Pentagon.

One was the 1963 CIA document, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, which describes interrogation techniques, including, among other things, "coercive counterintelligence interrogation of resistant sources." The CIA techniques involved were used in the CIA's Phoenix Program in South Vietnam. Eventually the CIA's psychological methods were spread worldwide through the U.S. Agency for International Development's Public Safety program and U.S. Army Mobile Training Teams.

Other manuals were prepared by the U.S. military and used between 1987 and 1991 for intelligence training courses at the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA). The manuals were also distributed by Special Forces Mobile Training teams to military personnel and intelligence schools in Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Peru.

The manuals advise that torture techniques can backfire and that the threat of pain is often more effective than pain itself. The manuals describe coercive techniques to be used "to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist." These techniques include prolonged constraint, prolonged exertion, extremes of heat, cold, or moisture, deprivation of food or sleep, disrupting routines, solitary confinement, threats of pain, deprivation of sensory stimuli, hypnosis, and use of drugs or placebos.

In a July 2002 memo sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, or JPRA, the military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects, not only referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" but warned that it would produce "unreliable information".JPRA Operational Concerns Over Application of Various Means of Induced Duress
(PDF), July 25, 2002, hosted by the Washington Post
April 24, 2009, the Washington Post

Domestic torture in modern times

Domestic police and prisons

Police brutality

In more modern policing, police brutality has involved torture. Police officials have generally described these cases as aberrations or the actions of criminals in police uniform, as New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir described the attack on Abner Louima.Safir on ABC Good Morning America, August 18, 1997; quoted in Human Rights Watch,
New York
, ''Shielded from Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States'', 1998. Police brutality critics, such as law professor Susan Bandes, have argued that such a view is erroneous and that it "allows police brutality to flourish in a number of ways, including making it easier to discount individual stories of police brutality, and weakening the case for any kind of systemic reform."Susan Bandes
Tracing the Pattern of No Pattern: Stories of Police Brutality
34 ''Loyola Law Review'', 2001.

In 1936, the Supreme Court recognized in '' Brown v. Mississippi'' that confessions extracted through police violence are inadmissible as evidence.

In the 1970s and 1980s the Chicago Police Department's Area 2 unit under Commander Jon Burge repeatedly used electroshock, near-suffocation by plastic bags and excessive beating on suspects. The City of Chicago's Office of Professional Standards (OPS) concluded that the physical abuse was systematic and, "The type of abuse described was not limited to the usual beating, but went into such esoteric areas as psychological techniques and planned torture."Paige Bierma
Torture behind bars: right here in the United States of America

The Progressive
', July 1994.

In 1997, Abner Louima was sodomized with a plunger by New York City police.Justin Volpe plead guilty and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Policeman in torture case changes plea to guilty
" CNN, May 25, 1999.

," Court TV, December 13, 1999. The officer was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

In May 2006 in Geneva, Switzerland the United Nations Committee against Torture released a report, which took note of the "limited investigation and lack of prosecution" in connection to accusations of torture in Areas 2 and 3 of the Chicago Police Department and called on American authorities to "promptly, thoroughly and impartially" investigate the accusations, and provide the committee with more information.

In 1983 Texas sheriff James Parker and three of his deputies were convicted for conspiring to use waterboarding to force confessions. The complaint said they "subject prisoners to a suffocating water torture ordeal in order to coerce confessions. This generally included the placement of a towel over the nose and mouth of the prisoner and the pouring of water in the towel until the prisoner began to move, jerk, or otherwise indicate that he was suffocating and/or drowning." The sheriff was sentenced to ten years in prison, and the deputies to four years.

In September 1997, two former officers from the Adelanto Police Department, San Bernardino County, California, were jailed for two years on federal charges, after pleading guilty to beating a suspect during questioning and forcing another man to lick blood off the floor in 1994.Amnesty International,
Rights for All
'', 1 October 1998.

According to the Innocence Project, about 25 percent of wrongfully convicted innocent people were coerced into making false confessions or false incriminating statements. Most of the victims were threatened by the terror of harsher sentences if they remained non-compliant.

Prisoner abuse

In 2005, a Channel 4 documentary "Torture: America's Brutal Prisons" showed video of naked prisoners being beaten, bitten by dogs, forced to crawl like worms, kicked in the groin, stunned with Taser guns and electric cattle prods. The guards also had them fight in a deadly duel: the refusal to duel would result in the death of prisoner, shot by the guards. The same fate would be reserved to the loser of duel, only for the guards' fun. A prisoner executed in 2004, , told that two of his row mates were beaten up; the guards then flooded the room, destroying every object owned by one of them: his letters, photos, legal documents, the book he was writing, his typewriter. The date of his execution, en other, was fixed for the following day. Other police officers hit a man, Nanon Williams, macing him in eyes: the subsequent beat-up resulted, for him, in a partial loss of sight. In one case a prisoner is strapped to a restraint chair and left for sixteen hours; two hours after being unshackled he dies from a blood clot. In another, mentally ill prisoner Charles Agster is suffocated to death. Another prisoner is found with a broken neck, broken toes and internal injuries following an argument with guards; after one month in a coma he dies from septicaemia. Fire extinguisher sized canisters of pepper spray are used to cover prisoners with chemicals, and they are then left, resulting in second degree burns. Photos are shown of Frank Valdes, a convicted killer on death row, who was beaten to death after writing to local Florida newspapers with allegations of prison officer corruption and brutality. Many of the segments in the documentary were several years old, ''e.g.'' from 1996, and were originally released to lawyers seeking justice for the victims of the offenses shown. Several lawsuits was filed against the prison which resulted in the inmates favor. Other prison officers involved in the incidents were suspended from duty or discharged from their employment.

A 2010 memoir by Wilbert Rideau, an inmate at Angola Prison from 1961 through 2001, states that "slavery was commonplace in Angola with perhaps a quarter of the population in bondage" throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. ''The New York Times'' states that weak inmates served as slaves who were raped, gang-raped, and traded and sold like cattle. Rideau stated that "The slave's only way out was to commit suicide, escape or kill his master." Herman Wallace and Albert Woodfox, members of the Angola 3, arrived at Angola in the late 1960s and became active members of the prison's chapter of the Black Panther Party, where they organized petitions and hunger strikes to protest conditions at the prison and helped new inmates protect themselves from rape and enslavement. C. Murray Henderson, one of the wardens brought in to clean up the prison, states in one of his memoirs that the systemic sexual slavery was sanctioned and facilitated by the prison guards.

From the year 2000 onwards, the Supermax facility at the Maine State Prison was the scene of video-taped forcible extractions that Lance Tapley in the Portland Phoenix wrote "look dlike torture."Lance Tapley
Torture in Maine's prison
, Portland Phoenix, November 11–17, 2005. Additionally, audio recordings were made of the torture of Lester Siler in Campbell County, Tennessee. Officers involved in the incident were convicted in court and sentenced to 2 to 5 years in prison

Border Patrol and immigration detention

The U.S. Border Patrol interdicts people crossing the border and maintains checkpoints and carries out raids in border regions. Human Rights Watch has documented severe human rights abuses by the Border Patrol, "including unjustified killing, torture, and rape, and routine beatings, rough physical treatment, and racially motivated verbal abuse."

Detained immigrants, including refugees seeking asylum, at the Esmor Inc. facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey

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