Senate Torture Report Sells Out in a Day, Melville to Print More

Posted on January 1, 2015

Indie publisher Melville House has another hit on its hands. The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture: Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program -- better known as the Senate Torture Report -- has sold out its original 50,000 print run, according to Publishers Weekly. The publisher will be going back to print to meet the demand for the hot title.

After years of political wrangling, the report was finally released by the Senate Select Committee on which is chaired by Senator Diane Feinstein. The report took three years to prepare and concludes that the CIA misled the White House and Congress about the nature, extent and effectiveness of torture used to interrogate suspects in black sites all over the world. It's tough reading. The New York Times said of the report: ..." even after being sanitized by the Central Intelligence Agency itself, [the report] is a portrait of depravity that is hard to comprehend and even harder to stomach."

Feinstein and the CIA got into public spats last spring over the release of the report, which is actually a mere 10% of the full report, which is said to contain even more hair-raising content. Feinstein accused the CIA of spying on Congress, hacking their computers and deleting classified documents. The CIA had to apologize for that. Republicans and Democrats publicly disagreed over the release of the report which revealed that the CIA hired two ex-military psychologists who had never interrogated a suspect and paid them $80 million to devise a torture program for terrorism suspects. The report concluded that the torture techniques were ineffective as prisoners will say anything to stop torture. Experienced FBI interrogators were apparently routinely excluded from cases in favor of using the torture techniques. You can see the Senate Committee's comments about the report here.

Melville House published the book in paperback format and in ebook format. The ebook format is fully searchable -- it is the only searchable version of the report available to the public. So if you want to find out more about waterboarding or rectal rehydration techniques, the ebook format is the way to go. If Santa failed to deliver you a copy, the book is available as an ebook on Amazon.com and is in most bookstores as a paperback.