Torturing Democracy

Torturing Democracy
Via National Security Archive at George Washington University

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Slate.com selected a key revelation in the film as the Slate “Hot Document” – a previously unpublished December 2002 draft of “standard operating procedure” at Guantanamo which shows that interrogators there adopted their techniques directly from the survival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 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 the entire film at torturingdemocracy.org.