Melville House has announced it is giving away free ebooks of its edition of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture after reports that the Republican head of the Senate Intelligence Committee was trying to suppress the still-classified sections of the report that were in circulation amongst other Federal agencies.

Melville House published the only section of the report that had been de-classified, although it was still heavily censored by the CIA — of which the report was highly critical.

Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the Intelligence Committee when the report was released, has joined other officials in accusing Republicans of trying to “erase history” by blocking release of the full report, which details the CIA’s rendition and interrogation program during the war in Iraq under the administration of George W. Bush.

“The Torture Report is one of the most important public documents of our lifetime,” explained publisher Dennis Johnson. “We wanted to do what we could to help spread the word that it was in danger of disappearing forever under this Republican government. Also, we felt that reading even this small part of the report was revealing — it is the ten percent of the iceberg that bespeaks the missing ninety percent. It will make the hair on the back of your head stand up and leave you wondering: What on earth could be so much worse than this that they won’t release it?”

The full committee report is 6700 pages long.

Melville House famously rushed the report into print when it was released as a blurry PDF on a Friday afternoon just before Christmas, getting print and digital editions out in an astonishing three weeks.

“One of our key goals was to make this a searchable digital book, which the government version really wasn’t,” said Johnson. “That took some grueling, round the clock work re-making the core document — including replicating the CIA’s innumerable black redactions — but lots of researchers and legal organizations such as the ACLU thanked us for that later, so we know this is a thing of meaning and import to circulate.”

The company has made the book available for free on its own website and at all retail outlets that sell digital books for the next week.

Contact: Julia Fleischaker; julia [at] mhpbooks.com; 718-722-9204

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