Human Rights and Civil Liberties

The post-9/11 wars included many abuses of human rights and civil liberties – costs that began during the wars and continue to the present day. The U.S. government conducted detention without trial, torture, labor abuses, and expanded surveillance and militarized policing. Today, Today, many of the government practices initially begun in the name of “fighting terrorism” now target a wide range of groups in the U.S., including migrants, people of color, and activists. 

During the post-9/11 wars, the U.S. detained thousands of people in the U.S., Iraq, Afghanistan, and dozens of other countries. The U.S. military held thousands of foreign Muslim security detainees and prisoners-of-war – including some women and boys – its detention centers abroad including Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo, where many were subjected to physical and psychological abuse. Many were detained without trial, with no effective way to challenge their detention and without the International Red Cross site visits required under international law. Some were secretly held at CIA-run “black site” prisons or passed to foreign countries with more lax human rights standards, via the seizure process known as “extraordinary rendition.” 

After launching the wars in 2001, the Bush Administration labeled detained persons as “unlawful enemy combatants,” rather than “prisoners of war” in an attempt to circumvent U.S. legal obligations under the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties, as well as U.S. domestic law. In a series of memos, Bush Administration lawyers crafted legal arguments reinterpreting the meaning of torture to rationalize changes to interrogation methods. While the so-called “torture memos” only officially approved “enhanced interrogation techniques” for use by the CIA on select detainees, the techniques otherwise considered to be torture quickly migrated, and persons around the world seized by the U.S. were tortured or mistreated by the CIA, military forces, contractors and U.S. allies. The U.S. also outsourced torture by modifying and expanding extraordinary rendition practices, transferring detainees abroad for torture at the hands of foreign governments.

The U.S. government leaned heavily on contractors to do its essential work during the war in Afghanistan. Non-U.S. workers such as guards, cooks, and cleaners were endangered and faced abysmal labor conditions while working for the U.S. military and its contractors. 

Within the United States, the government used the 9/11 attacks as a justification for dramatically expanding the government’s mass surveillance authorities and weakening Constitutional protections for U.S. residents. While “mass surveillance” is often used to refer to government spying, today it involves a complex grouping of federal agencies, local police, private companies, and even members of the public. Mass surveillance programs allow the U.S. government to warrantlessly and "incidentally" vacuum up Americans' communications, metadata and content, and store their information in data centers and repositories such as the database authorized by Section 702. Federal agencies also increasingly obtain data from private companies and track Americans using facial recognition, social media geomapping, and other technologies. All of this has normalized an erosion of privacy and freedom, and entrenched an expanding surveillance infrastructure that grows ever more difficult to control.

Likewise, police militarization has exploded since 9/11. The militarization of policing is as old as the institution itself and rooted in anti-Black oppression, but its intensification must be counted among the costs of the post-9/11 wars. These wars have led to expanded intelligence operations, higher numbers of veterans hired by police departments, and dramatically increased military equipment flows to police. Black, brown, indigenous, and low-income communities bear the brunt of this militarization. SWAT teams, which derive tactics and equipment from the military, are disproportionately used against Black and Latinx people in raids like the one that killed 7-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones in Detroit, Michigan in 2010. Brutal forms of protest policing also draw on military tactics and equipment. 

Police militarization and mass surveillance have intensified the criminalization of marginalized and racialized groups, from Muslims and Arabs to Black and Indigenous organizers, and has increasingly targeted protest movements such as Black Lives Matter and the Dakota Pipeline Movement. Surveillance has also facilitated the tracking, incarceration, and deportation of thousands of migrants, most of whom were guilty only of the civil offense of crossing a border without government permission. 

Muslims and people of Arab and South Asian descent in the U.S. have experienced not only government practices that amount to racial profiling, but also public animosity in the form of hate crimes, intimidation, and discrimination. Between 2000 and 2009, though the overall number of reported hate crime incidents decreased by over 18 percent, the percentage of hate crime incidents directed towards Muslims increased by over 500 percent. Anti-Muslim activity has increased again since late 2015. 

Gender-based violence has also increased in the U.S. military and amongst civilian populations. Over the past decade, the U.S. military has implemented policies to promote gender equality, notably lifting the ban on women in combat roles in 2013 and opening all military jobs to women by 2016. However, violent patterns of abuse and misogyny continued within military workplaces.

 

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Key Findings

Detention

• In Iraq, over 100,000 prisoners passed through the American-run detention system, most with no effective way to challenge their imprisonment. In the first years of the war, many detainees were processed through the notorious Abu Ghraib prison facility, which housed over 8,000 prisoners at its peak in 2004.

• Thousands of people in Afghanistan were detained as terror suspects, with 50,000 detained during just the first three years of war.

• As of January 2022, the U.S. was still detaining 39 of the nearly 800 men and boys it brought to Guantánamo from 2002 to 2008. Twenty-seven of those who remain have never been charged.

• The CIA orchestrated a system of black sites throughout the world in which it secretly detained at least 119 men.

• The U.S. government transported suspects to dozens of countries with more lax human rights standards, where they faced torture or mistreatment. At least 54 governments participated to varying degrees in the U.S. “Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation” (RDI) program. In addition to hosting CIA black sites, they detained, interrogated, or abused prisoners; permitted the use of airspace for CIA flights; and/or shared intelligence.

Torture

• At least 39 people are known to have been tortured by the CIA, as of 2022.

• From 2002 to 2005, the peak years of U.S. detention and torture programs, at least 17 people died from abuse while in the custody of the CIA or the U.S or U.K. militaries in Afghanistan or Iraq.

• Physicians for Human Rights recognized psychological torture as systematic and central to U.S. interrogations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo.

• As of 2022, no U.S. government officials have been held accountable for creating, authorizing, or implementing the CIA’s secret detention and torture programs.

Abusive Labor Conditions

• During the post-9/11 wars and since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, Afghans who worked with the U.S. military as translators and in other roles have been endangered by a broken Special Immigrant Visa process.

• In 2020, approximately 65% of workers for military contractors in Afghanistan were citizens of Afghanistan or a third-party country, such as Nepal. 

• In the war zones, migrant workers, so-called “third country nationals,” faced abusive labor conditions while working for the U.S. military and defense contractors, with little to zero protections.

• The U.S. military and Department of Labor have done little to enforce the U.S. Defense Base Act (DBA), which calls for the provision of compensation to all workers, regardless of their nationality, injured under U.S. contracts, and for the provision of financial compensation to their kin in case of death.

Domestic Surveillance

• Mass surveillance lacks government transparency, which makes accounting for the true budgetary costs nearly impossible. However, available data on government intelligence institutions offer some sense of the mushrooming scale: The annual U.S. intelligence budget doubled from approximately $40 billion per year in the late 1990s to $80 billion per year in 2020. 

• Five years after its creation, the Department of Homeland Security was found to have overseen $15 billion in over-budget, delayed, or canceled contracts.

• A “Special Registration” requirement announced in 2002 required that all males from a list of Arab and Muslim countries report to the government to register and be fingerprinted. The Obama administration suspended this program in May 2011; the program had not resulted in a single terrorism-related conviction despite tens of thousands of people forced to register.

• Over more than a decade, the New York Police Department’s Muslim surveillance program secretly spied on, mapped, criminalized, and undermined the freedom and safety of Muslim communities in the name of counterterrorism – apparently without producing even a single lead.

Police Militarization

• As of 2020, the 1033 Program had transferred at least $1.6 billion worth of military equipment to law enforcement agencies since 9/11, compared to at least $27 million before 9/11.

• As of 2020, the 1033 Program had transferred nearly 520,000 individual items to law enforcement after 9/11, compared to nearly 17,000 items before 9/11.

• While no public database collects national data on police veteran status, analyses as of 2020 suggest that between 19 – 28% of police officers have current or prior military service, compared to about 7% of the general population.

Gender-Based Violence

• Sexual assault prevalence in the U.S. military is likely two to four times higher than official government estimations. On average, over the course of the war in Afghanistan, 24% of active-duty women and 1.9% of active-duty men experienced sexual assault.

• Experiences of gender inequality are most pronounced for women of color, who experience intersecting forms of sexism and racism and are one of the fastest-growing populations within the military, while queer and trans service members are at disproportionately greater risk for sexual assault.

• Years after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, women in Iraq continued to suffer increasing levels of violence, due to the social dislocation, economic hardship, ethnic and sectarian tensions, and corruption that characterized the country in the aftermath of war.

(Page updated as of June 2025)