Was one of the three falklands veterans being on board the ship in the watch guardsmen and burned to death. Are they falling back on the campaign . To attract the differences or to try to learn lessons . Guest there is a study that was kind of a take that but they went out of their way to prove the rate was way below that. There wasnt a problem here we dont need to worry about this. Host to turn that around is there an emphasis on the way things are in the United States and the way that they track backs it does make the news regular and there are a lot of people that are deeply invested in the problem and the folks that really attracts out and are concerned about that and we would probably include ourselves in that. But when you compare that to another country where there is but little attention. You have to be careful about for trading the veterans as victims are ticking time bombs of angry men that are about to go postal at any moment. I think that most people have amazing skills. And in many ways they shouldnt be per trade as victims but at the same time the problems are real and can be treated and we need to reduce the stigma. You want to not to dishonor or belittle a caricature services of the veterans at veteran but at the same time you need to acknowledge that there are problems. Host i would agree with that completely in the past and present. I dont think that there are easy answers to this problem at all. At least there is a tension on it. We are pretty much out of time. I enjoyed the conversation. Take care and congratulations. That was booktv Signature Program which offers up the latest nonfiction books are interviewed by journalists public policymakers and others familiar with their material. After words airs every weekend on booktv at 10 p. M. On saturday, 12 and 9 p. M. And 12 a. M. On monday. You can also watch online. Go to booktv. Org and click on booktv in a series and the topics list on the upper right side of the page. The Senior Editor at Melville House discusses the content of the torture report and the decision made to publish a paperback version. You are watching booktv on cspan2. I am Rick Macarthur the publisher of harpers magazine. I am delighted to welcome you to the first and what i hope will be an endless series of collaborations between book culture and harpers. Book culture in columbus is a proudly independent bookstore located in the heart of manhattans upper west side. Harpers magazine as americas oldest continuously published monthly and its for the best of American Literature including fiction reporting, criticism and photography. As a part owner of the store harpers hopes to work over there. Give them a hand. [applause] as often as we can to bring lightning authors and issues to the floor in front of a Live Audience of authentic readers and book buyers. Tonight we are fortunate to present and discuss an extraordinary book the Senate IntelligenceCommittee Report on torture that is senator Dianne Feinsteins expose of the Central Intelligence agencys program in the wake of 9 11 of interrogating and torturing the detainees held in secret prisons around the globe. The cia torture report is published by Melville House a company that epitomizes the importance of the necessity of independent book publishers. It is an amazing feats to the publishing feat to the publishing ingenuity that we are going to discuss with the editor of the book mark of Melville House. We are also going to be guided through the most salient features by the contributing editor to harpers magazine and an International Lawyer with special expertise in human rights. In the a march 2010 issue of harpers magazine wrote the National Magazine awardwinning expose. Theyve done followup reporting in harpers and we will publish his review of the torture report in the issue that comes out in march. He is also the author of the secrecy just out and after mark and scott gets to talk with a time for questions and i will remind you when you want to ask a question wait for someone to hand you a microphone so that it can be recorded. This socalled report is a good read and a narrative within authors voice suspense, lots of irony and a frightening conclusion that merits being purchased by the general reader. I admit that i approached it with trepidation assuming wrongly that it would amount to the dry collection of facts that could easily be summarized in a few pages. On the contrary, to fully appreciate senator feinsteins considerable accomplishment, and that of the principal writer daniel jones you need to view it as literature and immerse yourself in the text area this is much more than a horror story about American Government employees gone brutally why old trampling on the bodies of their victims while they trample on the rule of law. Its also a story of deep government which is to say unaccountable government beyond the reach of elected officials. It really ought to give pause to the most fervent defenders of the torture practiced at the cia. Please abide about a book and read it not just to support novell house and senator feinstein but also to educate yourself free of the mediation of newspapers and politicians with too many axes to grind. For all its faults this report is a tribute to what is left in the tattered constitution and its beleaguered system of checks and balances. Lets get to the conversation and i think that we will start with mark. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you so much for that extraordinary introduction. And i should say anybody that takes a commitment to the truth seriously if they are not a harpers subscribers they are making a mistake. Theres been very few outlooks in the last several post9 11 era that cast a serious light on the american come, foreign and domestic policy and it is foremost in that effort and im so thrilled to be speaking with tom delay turned to for years over again to bring this injustice to light. Its a remarkable thing that hes done in his journalism in the buck and im really looking forward to diving into the support and the substance. I want to speak briefly about how it is that Melville House the publisher i worked working to publish this report and to speak a little bit about the kind of rick discussed this to speak about the letter a history because it is a genre and then we will speak about the origins of the report that are adverse and adverse in their content. Publishers have been publishing reports like this for decades in the 1960s to Commission Report was very quickly turned into a book that became a bestseller that sold over 1. 5 million copies. The Church Committee became a book and that sort of modern era of this kind of report really begins with the star report. The star report is a sort of infamous document many of us came out of my viola connections and trying to log onto netscape did we saw it in our local walmart and it is an interesting case. There is a great wall street journal article published the day before it is released and in that article there is an interview with the founder of the Public Affairs press and he says we are going to publish this report and put this out into a book and the publisher in the same article says we are not going to do it. We dont think we are going to make this commitment. You can find this online that says we are going to do this. So the appeal was too great and theres the massmarket addiction and then of course theres the Commission Report and the financial crisis in the very, the two modern analogues to the documents. Those reports were published respectively by publicaffairs but then what i would like to sort of stress and what i think its an important distinction is that those reports were actually published in collaboration with the publishing houses and in the fact you can find this in the New York Times article and the report is actually held up by a couple of weeks to allow Public Affairs to typeset the report simultaneously with its release. There is a question as to whether this represents the kind of noble effort to do this but certainly by the time they were leaked there was a comic book edition rightparen or everybody to buy. We noticed that this wasnt going to happen with the torture report which many have said and i would certainly stress is the most significant report of its kind. We looked around and there didnt seem to be a publisher stepping forward which is very odd to us. The week before it was published there was an article in Time Magazine that quotes the Public Affairs and has basically we have been trying to reach Diane Feinstein and the committee and that seemed to suggest that there wasnt going to be a kind of code coupon code code on both official and edition but it also seemed the most likely publisher of the report within the doing it. Melville house since its founding in 2001, has been publishing politically engaged work that has aimed as much as possible to kind of pushback against the mainstream consensus and the political narrative of the Bush Administration. We published a book of torture taxi which actually was a book where you could find the first photographs of some of the black sites in pakistan that come up again and again and in this book they are called cobalt. But those sites were not actually photographed even by the Washington Post that reported on them and so this sort of made itself known and theres other books like this. So we felt for a couple Different Reasons that this made sense to do and then we decided to do it and thats when things got complicated because the report was released on the morning of december 90 and we looked at it and it was a pdf report, so poorly formatted it and want to bring it home to mom. Not only was it rejected, which we will get to, but the thing itself was very poorly formatted and it seemed to have been printed and rescanned. So it didnt make for a kind of organic reading experience lets say. But we as Melville House quickly decided that this was going to be an enormous challenge but at the same time this itself was the opportunity. We didnt think people are going to sit at home on their couches and read this indigestible pdf. We thought lets put as much effort into this production for the documents now as we can and we will come up with something clean if we make the time and we did. And you know, over the course of the production process, we were dealing with a lot of various production glitches that we can sort of discussed but i think what also kind of struck all of us and it was a team effort was how consequential this report really was with how hefty and complex and important and as literary and how significant this work was and i want to talk about that. But before we do my sense of the report is the story of the publication contest it difficult english stories behind the reports release. I think one can arguably say that it reveals as much about the kind of influence at the Central Intelligence agency as the documents within. So lets start there. What other kind of precedence during the Bush Administration for the report on the cia activity . Basically there was nothing. We had a special commission of the inquiry that we will get into the bad intelligence that led to the iraq war. But we have a generally very little oversight being performed by either of the two congressional committees and so we come to this. And of course i think that we hear aggressive pushback today it is a burden some deep reaching plague that the committee on intelligence unleashed on them but in fact if we go back to the beginning we discover that no, actually the cia invited this. It all goes back to the destruction first we were told of one take of a waterboarding session by an unidentified cia agent, and then we subsequently discussed that with jose rodriguez, a very senior figure. And we later discovered also on one tape it was 92 tapes. It was all of them that had been destroyed. And this was reported on the front page of the New York Times by mark vicente. They got quite a bit of interest immediately from the Oversight Committee with the number of senators thinking we seem to have missed something. Maybe evidence is being destroyed. And there were some inquiries about what exactly had happened. And Michael Hayden then the director of the cia had a quick series of meetings with the chair and Ranking Member of the committee and told them not to worry, there is redundant evidence of everything. So even if these tapes were in fact destroyed, we have contemporaneous written records that cover everything. So, there is nothing that has really been lost as a result. I dont expect you after having heard that these tapes were destroyed, i dont expect you to take my word for it so i would invite you to send the team over and go through and read all of this other evidence. So, it starts with an invitation from the cia and the fact that they like to suppress right now and as a staff team from the committee went over and went through the use cables from various outposts mostly associated with black sites and came back with a quick summary and the summary was its very clear from what we read in the cables that the program does not correspond to what was briefed to the committee. There are different techniques being used which are much harsher and it is larger in scope and this time it seems far more severe than anything we were told about before and this presented the Committee Leadership with a dilemma now having the basis of this sort of sample being told that you have misled this and then the decision was taken which was in the outset almost unanimous to go ahead and commission a full indepth review of all the cia documentation from the beginning. Now, the scope of the review was also a matter of some controversy from the outside. In fact right now you will hear prominent theaters in the senate say this report is no good because it doesnt deal with what was going on in the white house and other agencies. The government is only looking at the cia. Some of the same republican senators making those comments are the people who insisted that that be so. They insisted that in fact there would be no review of what was going on inside the white house and other agencies and for obvious reasons they were afraid that the results could be publicly embarrassing to the white house and other Senior Administration officials inviting from their week at the launch of the program and it becomes a multiyear exercise that is quite remarkable. We have any lawyers or commercial litigators here . What you see going on is exactly what goes on in the american commercial litigation. So with the cia saying we are entitled to do the review before we turn it over we cant just be asked to turn it over and we have to have plenty of time to do that and because we are dealing with topsecret matters, we are going to put in place all of these special precautions such in fact are going to take years to put into place before you can even get down to starting the process of the review and we are not going to allow you to take these documents to the secure document rooms at the senate. You can do that. You can only view them in a secure facility of the cia. And we are not going to to allow two to house the documents or the records on the Senate Computers. That is unsafe. They will be on computers the cia has created and maintained that well turn will turn them over to you for your use. These Little Details become quite important later on as we will see. And then the cia well you know we need to do a complete review of all these documents before we let you see anything. The review is for the relevance and privilege and by the way if we have any lawyers you know what privileges exist for the cia to what would be documents in the Oversight Committee. There are no privileges. But nonetheless we have to have the review for the privileges that dont exist. And we dont have anybody on our staff now who is available to do this review. So we are going to hire contractors, get this, supersecret, so secret that we cant show it to the senate that we are going to hire contractors whove never seen the documents that otherwise wouldnt see them to do the review for us. So as not to put too much of a burden on the staff and that is going to take many months before that can possibly be done. So, years and years. And it develops on. So this is a very, very conscious effort to slow walk the entire process to drag it out year after year after year. And as we get down to the end theres some amazing twists and turns over the specific documents into evidence, but one particular events appears the cia staff are working in preparing these documents for the transition theyve also been commissioned by the director of the cia to prepare a summary of everything that the senate is going to see. So tell the director what it is that they are going to see. They prepared a summary for the director and by mistake apparently this summary winds up being loaded onto the Senate Computers at the review site. So the staff see it and they say this is amazing because here this is basically the notes and summaries done by the cia of the documents and they are drawing exactly the same conclusions that we are drawing about the documents, not surprisingly because we are just describing these. That same conclusions basically that that is bottom line no actionable intelligence was ever collected from never collected from the use of these aggressive techniqu