Torture Done by The United States

Torture in the United States includes documented and alleged cases of torture both inside the United States and outside its borders by U.S. government personnel. This includes the U.S. government, fifty U.S. state and territorial governments, 3,033 county, and thousands of municipal governments, all of which have their own independent judicial systems. All are subject to the U.S. Constitution and their own state constitutions.

While the term "torture" is defined in numerous places, including dictionaries and encyclopedias of various nations or cultures, this article only addresses the legal definition of the term, under the codified and case law of the United States of America.^{[nb 1]} After the US dismissed United Nations concerns about torture in 2006,^[1] one U.K. judge observed 'America's idea of what is torture ... does not appear to coincide with that of most civilised nations'.^[2] A two-year bipartisan study concluded that it was "indisputable" that US forces had employed torture as well as "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in many interrogations; that "the nation's most senior officials" bear ultimate responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of these techniques, and that there is substantial evidence that information obtained by these methods was neither useful nor reliable.^[3]