The World Wide Web’s a big place. According to Wolfram Alpha there are at least 231.5 million websites on the Net. What if you were searching for 100,000 pages of information amidst those hundreds of millions of websites?
That is why the Torture Archive, an ongoing project of the National Security Archive Digital Collections at George Washington University, is such a valuable resource. The Torture Archive contains primary source documents related to the United States government policy toward rendition, detainees, interrogation and torture in connection with the conduct of hostilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the broader context of the global war on terror. Most of these documents were in the public domain, many revealed as a result of litigation, but they were very difficult to find because they were scattered through numerous virtual locations.
The Torture Archive may be accessed at www.torturingdemocracy.org, together with the documentary film, “Torturing Democracy,” and the companion resources posted for viewers of the film. There is also a timeline related to the events and documents, plus the annotated transcript of “Torturing Democracy.”
The initial catalog of torture-related documents cited in the documentary film, is published in the Torture Archive, together with PDF images of the documents themselves. Some of the documents contain the original Arabic transcripts of witnesses and detainees alongside English translations. Subsequent postings will build the Torture Archive to ultimately include more than 7,000 original documents totaling more than 100,000 pages.
Users can search the full database of documents by title, date, organization or keywords and then download the PDFs as required. The documents are sourced from US executive branch policy memoranda, legal documents from US and foreign courts, and on-the-ground information about actual practices by the US military and intelligence personnel. It is expected that the Torture Archive will continue to add documents as they are released through US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation or Executive discretion.