Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian citizen and alleged terrorist born in Saudi Arabia currently held by the U.S. in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. He is held under the authority of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF).
Abu Ghraib prison was a prison complex in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, located 32 kilometers (20 mi) west of Baghdad. Abu Ghraib prison was opened in the 1950s and served as a maximum-security prison. From the 1970s, the prison was used by Saddam Hussein to hold political prisoners and later the United States to hold Iraqi prisoners. It developed a reputation for torture and extrajudicial killing, and was closed in 2014.
Charles A. Graner Jr. is an American former soldier who was court-martialed for prisoner abuse after the 2003–2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Along with other soldiers of his Army Reserve unit, the 372nd Military Police Company, Graner was accused of allowing and inflicting sexual, physical, and psychological abuse on Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison, a notorious prison in Baghdad during the United States' occupation of Iraq.
Camp Bucca was a forward operating base that housed a theater internment facility maintained by the United States military in the vicinity of Umm Qasr, Iraq. After being taken over by the U.S. military in April 2003, it was renamed after Ronald Bucca, a New York City fire marshal who died in the 11 September 2001 attacks. The site where Camp Bucca was built had earlier housed the tallest structure in Iraq, a 492-meter-high TV mast.
During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including physical abuse, sexual humiliation, physical and psychological torture, and rape, as well the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi and the desecration of his body. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs of the abuse by CBS News in April 2004. The incidents caused shock and outrage, receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.
About six months after the United States invasion of Iraq of 2003, rumors of Iraq prison abuse scandals started to emerge.
Copper Green is reportedly one of several code names for a U.S. black ops program in which coercive psychological and physical measures were used on detainees in military prisons. Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported on the term in an article in the May 24, 2004 issue of The New Yorker. According to Hersh, the task force was formed with the direct approval of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and run by Deputy Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. Hersh claims the Special Access Program (SAP) members were told "Grab whom you must. Do what you want." The program allegedly designed physical coercion and sexual humiliation techniques for use against Muslim Arab men specifically, to retrieve information from suspects, and to blackmail them into becoming informants.
Geoffrey D. Miller is a retired United States Army major general who commanded the US detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Iraq. Detention facilities in Iraq under his command included Abu Ghraib prison, Camp Cropper, and Camp Bucca. He is noted for having trained soldiers in using torture, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" in US euphemism, and for carrying out the "First Special Interrogation Plan," signed by the Secretary of Defense, against a Guantanamo detainee.
In 2005, The New York Times obtained a 2,000-page United States Army investigatory report concerning the homicides of two unarmed civilian Afghan prisoners by U.S. military personnel in December 2002 at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility in Bagram, Afghanistan and general treatment of prisoners. The two prisoners, Habibullah and Dilawar, were repeatedly chained to the ceiling and beaten, resulting in their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both the prisoners' deaths were homicides. Autopsies revealed severe trauma to both prisoners' legs, describing the trauma as comparable to being run over by a bus. Seven soldiers were charged in 2005.
Dilawar, also known as Dilawar of Yakubi, was an Afghan farmer and taxi driver who was tortured to death by US Army soldiers at the Bagram Collection Point, a US military detention center in Afghanistan.
Extrajudicial prisoners of the United States, in the context of the early twenty-first century War on Terrorism, refers to foreign nationals the United States detains outside of the legal process required within United States legal jurisdiction. In this context, the U.S. government is maintaining torture centers, called black sites, operated by both known and secret intelligence agencies. Such black sites were later confirmed by reports from journalists, investigations, and from men who had been imprisoned and tortured there, and later released after being tortured until the CIA was comfortable they had done nothing wrong, and had nothing to hide.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison within the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, also referred to as Gitmo, on the coast of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. As of April 2023, of the 779 people detained there since January 2002 when the military prison first opened after the September 11 attacks, 740 had been transferred elsewhere, 30 remained there, and nine had died while in custody.
Task Force 6–26 is a United States Joint military/Government Agency, originally set-up to find "High-Value Targets" (HVT's) in Iraq in the aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom. This Special Operations unit is very similar to JSOC Task Force 121 which was created to capture Saddam Hussein and high-ranking Al-Qaeda members. The various name changes seen by the group are to ensure Operational Security, although their makeup and goals largely remain the same. The main objective of Task Force 6–26 was the capture or liquidation of terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who led Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The unit is made up of U.S. Special Operations Forces members including Delta Force, DEVGRU, 24th Special Tactics Squadron and the 75th Ranger Regiment along with the CIA's Special Activities Center. Other military and DIA personnel are believed to have been involved as 'limited' members of the unit, along with FBI agents.
Balad Air Base, is an Iraqi Air Force base located near Balad in the Sunni Triangle 40 miles (64 km) north of Baghdad, Iraq.
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" was a program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world—including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bucharest—authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, rape, sexual assault, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white room torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
Joint Special Operations Command Task Force in the Iraq War was a joint American and British special operations unit, of which little is publicly known. It is described as a "hunter-killer team" with its core made up of the United States Army's 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta and the 75th Ranger Regiment, as well as the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group and members of the United States Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron, all under Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and elements from the United Kingdom Special Forces, including the Special Air Service, Special Boat Service (SBS), Special Reconnaissance Regiment (SRR), 18 (UKSF) Signal Regiment and the Special Forces Support Group (SFSG). The unit was reported to be responsible for the cross border raid into Syria from Iraq in October 2008 that resulted in eight deaths including Abu Ghadiya, along with several US operations in the Horn of Africa targeting al-Qaeda.
A number of incidents stemming from the September 11 attacks have raised questions about legality.
The phrase No Blood, No Foul insinuates that as long as violence does not leave a mark, it is not prosecutable. The phrase has been used euphemistically in the context of the game streetball, the use of surreptitious abuse at the Iraqi military base Camp Nama, the use of physical and psychological torture more broadly, and acts of medical malpractice.
Michael E. Dunlavey is a former major general in the United States Army. Following his retirement from the Army he was elected a State Judge in Erie Pennsylvania.
Harmeet Singh Sooden is a Canadian-New Zealand anti-war activist who volunteered for the international NGO Christian Peacemaker Teams in Iraq. He was held captive in Baghdad with three others for almost four months until being freed by multi-national forces on 23 March 2006.
U.S. Air Force 
U.S. Army 
U.S. Marine Corps 
CIA