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The Torturing Democracy Homepage - www.torturingdemocracy.org

Washington Broadcast Set for Torturing Democracy

Reviewers rate new documentary "compelling," "impressive," "top-shelf"

Guantanamo interrogation draft picked by Slate.com as "Hot Document"

For more information contact:
Thomas Blanton/Ilyse Veron - 202/994-7000

In the News

"PBS Slow to Embrace a Program on Torture"
By Elizabeth Jensen
New York Times
October 15, 2008

"Gitmo Torture Tips"
By Bonnie Goldstein
Slate.com
October 14, 2008

"Did PBS Bury an Expose on Torture?"
By Scott Horton
TheDailyBeast.com
October 14, 2008

Washington, D.C., 17 October 2008 – The new documentary film on the Bush administration’s interrogation and detention policies, Torturing Democracy, will air on Washington D.C.’s WETA-TV tonight at 10 p.m.

Produced and written by eight-time Emmy winner and National Security Archive fellow Sherry Jones, the documentary has drawn major online buzz as well as New York Times coverage of PBS’s failure to find a national scheduling spot for the film before President Bush leaves office in January 2009. 

Reviewers have described the film as a “compelling example of video story-telling” that “delivers impressively on a promise to connect the dots in an investigation of interrogations of prisoners in U.S. custody.”

Slate.com selected a key revelation in the film as the Slate “Hot Document” this week – a previously unpublished December 2002 draft of “standard operating procedure” at Guantanamo which shows that interrogators there adopted their techniques directly from the survival training (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape or SERE) given to American troops so they could resist the worst of Communist gulag treatment.

The companion Web site for the film, www.torturingdemocracy.org, features key documents, a detailed timeline, the full annotated transcript of the show, and lengthy transcripts of major interviews carried out for the film. Hosted by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, the Web site will ultimately include a complete “Torture Archive” of primary sources.

Watch clips of the movie below, or stream the entire film at torturingdemocracy.org.

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