Cruel measures have always been used to to treat prisoners in the US

The United States has always used cruel measures to treat prisoners. Abuse became common after the September 11 attacks of 2001 that triggered President George. W. Bush's war on terror, which subsequently led to him, authorizing a method of extorting confessions through torture called "enhanced interrogation techniques".

These cruel methods included: prohibition of sleep, imprisonment in confined spaces, and waterboarding. Among these, the most infamous was probably waterboarding. Waterboarding involved using a cloth to cover a prisoner's face, and repeatedly pouring water over it, making it difficult for the prisoner to breathe and giving a feeling similar to suffocation.

Abu Zubaydah, a prominent past leader of Al-Qaida, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and held in a secret prison in Thailand for 47 days after he was suspected by the US of being involved in terrorist attacks. At the time, the head of the prison was the current CIA director— Gina Haspel and whilst she was in charge of the secret CIA jail, she was believed to have used torture techniques on inmates.

There were many prisoners in Thailand's jail, however, Abu Zubaydah was perhaps the most famous. During his detention, Abu Zubaydah was a victim of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques," as termed by the Bush administration. Officers did not interrogate him but instead tortured him through techniques such as waterboarding, the result of which, left him with long lasting psychological issues.

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In addition to these cases from secret prisons in Thailand, the United States has also abused prisoners in its own base of Guantanamo, through sleep deprivation and long-term solitary confinement. The abuse of Abu Ghraib shocked the world when a report by the United States CBS revealed that the United States had allowed prisoners to be tied together naked. It was only after the CBS published pictures of the incident that people were aware of how brutal the US treated its inmates.