CIA torture report to arrive in every US presidential candidate's mailbox
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Version 0 of 1. Independent publisher Melville House is sending its edition of the CIA torture report to every candidate standing for the American presidency, in a bid to find out where the politicians “stand on torture”. A bill banning torture was passed in the Senate on Tuesday despite opposition from 21 Republican senators, and co-founder of Melville House Dennis Johnson said that the publisher wanted to ask presidential candidates “where they stand on torture, if they’ve read the report, and where they stand on the bill passed this week, because it could be overturned by a new president”. Melville House is posting out boxes containing five copies of The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture to all of the people who have declared their candidacy for American president in the 2016 election. “Even including Donald Trump,” said Johnson. “Even though he’s a ridiculous candidate. We will send it to him, too.” Related: Senate passes torture ban despite Republican opposition The boxes contain a letter from the publisher, asking the candidates to “read and share these copies with your staff and advisers”, in the hope “that they will help you clarify your position on the legality, morality, and efficacy of torture”. So far, said Melville House: “Only four of the 50 (or so) announced presidential candidates have gone on the record as supporting the ban on torture (Lincoln Chafee, Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley, and Bernie Sanders)”. Announcing its plans, Melville House’s Julia Fleischaker said that “the American people deserve to know where their leaders stand on vital issues, and that we know too little about our presidential candidates’ stance on torture. And, for that matter, our candidates know too little, too. After all, former vice president Dick Cheney said that he hadn’t even read the report, and this is surely true of many of the current candidates.” Melville House published the 500-page report, which chronicles the CIA’s interrogation and detention programmes in the wake of 9/11, in late December 2014, after it was released to the public domain by the Senate intelligence committee earlier that month. “It was the equivalent of a late Friday afternoon press release: they didn’t want anyone to talk about it. It was the Christmas season, and it was a PDF which was almost unreadable it was such poor quality, and totally unsearchable,” said Johnson. “That effectively succeeded, and very few people talked about it for more than a day or so. That’s probably the reason none of the big publishers wanted to do it. We had an amazing response as a publishing story [for releasing it], but the discussions about torture should have happened, and didn’t, so this is another opportunity to go back to that.” The independent publisher had staff “working around the clock” to release its version of the report last year. “We made it in a week,” said Johnson. “It was heinous to do, because of the redactions.” Melville House currently has 55,000 copies of the report in print, which Johnson called “pretty extraordinary … We’ve been selling lot internationally, with a lot of UK sales. And there are lots of academic sales, and professors adopting it for their classes, and a lot of library sales,” he said. “We’ve also sold a good number to the public, but it hasn’t sky-rocketed into bestsellerdom.” |