CIA torture report to be published

The Senate intelligence committee’s CIA torture report will be published as a book by independent press Melville House before the end of the year. The book, “The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” will be available in print as a paperback and as an e-book. It is already available for pre-order at the Melville House website.

The vast majority of the CIA torture report is still classified, but a redacted executive summary of the committee’s findings was released to the public Tuesday. The document was met widely with shock and horror; the Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote that the report “documented ... outrageous conduct in stomach-turning detail but also described new offenses to human dignity that border on the pornographic.”

“[I]t’s probably the most important government document of our generation, even one of the most significant in the history of our democracy,” said Melville House co-publisher Dennis Johnson in a release. “Melville House was founded in 2001 with the express purpose of trying to speak out about what was going on under the administration of George Bush. We felt it was our duty to try and get this report out there to the widest possible audience.”

Although the report is available to the public online, Melville House hopes to reformat the book to a higher-quality version. “We’re working round the clock to turn the low-res PDF released by the government into something we can lay out and print,” Johnson told the Washington Post. “The enormous number of redactions (the heavy black lines over the text) makes that a trick, so we’ve got our editorial team slaving over that.”

The co-owner of Politics & Prose, a Washington bookstore, says the store will be carrying Melville House’s book: “The book will be on our shelves at Politics & Prose – and hopefully at independent bookstores across the country – as soon as it is out, and surely will be a topic of great interest to our customers.” At least one other retailer, BookPeople in Austin, Texas, has already committed to stocking the book, according to a Twitter post.