Collection
State Power
Cases documenting the use of extraordinary state power against political movements and foreign governments — surveillance, infiltration, covert intervention and detention outside ordinary legal process.
5 files in this collection
Japanese-American Incarceration
Following President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066 of 19 February 1942, the U.S. government forcibly removed approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — roughly two-thirds of them U.S. citizens — from the West Coast and detained them in ten inland camps administered by the War Relocation Authority. A 1983 federal commission concluded the incarceration was not justified by military necessity.
MKUltra
Between 1953 and 1973, the CIA ran MKUltra, a program of roughly 150 subprojects researching behavioral modification and interrogation techniques — including LSD and other drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation and electroshock — conducted at universities, hospitals and prisons, in many cases on subjects who were not informed they were part of an experiment. CIA Director Richard Helms ordered most MKUltra records destroyed in 1973, so the program's full scope and human toll are not fully known.
Iran 1953
In August 1953, the CIA, working with British intelligence, organized and financed the overthrow of Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, who had nationalized the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The coup consolidated the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for the following 26 years. The CIA publicly acknowledged its role for the first time in 2013, through declassified documents.
Guatemala 1954
In June 1954, the CIA organized and armed a small rebel force, backed by an extensive psychological warfare campaign, that overthrew Guatemala's democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz, following his government's land-reform program that had expropriated uncultivated land from large landowners, including the U.S.-based United Fruit Company. The coup opened nearly four decades of military-dominated rule and contributed to conditions leading to a 36-year civil war.
Abu Ghraib
In late 2003, United States military police guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in occupied Iraq subjected detainees to physical and sexual abuse, humiliation, and torture, documented in photographs that became public in April 2004. An internal Army investigation found the conduct "sadistic, blatant, and wanton"; eleven soldiers were court-martialed, while accountability for policy decisions higher in the chain of command remains a disputed question.