Matthew Alexander on CBS Evening News with Whit Johnson, UCLA International Institute

COLLECTED BY

The Internet Archive discovers and captures web pages through many different web crawls. At any given time several distinct crawls are running, some for months, and some every day or longer. View the web archive through the Wayback Machine .

Collection: Wide Crawl started March 2011

Web wide crawl with initial seedlist and crawler configuration from March 2011. This uses the new HQ software for distributed crawling by Kenji Nagahashi.

What’s in the data set:

Crawl start date: 09 March, 2011
Crawl end date: 23 December, 2011
Number of captures: 2,713,676,341
Number of unique URLs: 2,273,840,159
Number of hosts: 29,032,069

The seed list for this crawl was a list of Alexa’s top 1 million web sites, retrieved close to the crawl start date. We used Heritrix (3.1.1-SNAPSHOT) crawler software and respected robots.txt directives. The scope of the crawl was not limited except for a few manually excluded sites.

However this was a somewhat experimental crawl for us, as we were using newly minted software to feed URLs to the crawlers, and we know there were some operational issues with it. For example, in many cases we may not have crawled all of the embedded and linked objects in a page since the URLs for these resources were added into queues that quickly grew bigger than the intended size of the crawl (and therefore we never got to them). We also included repeated crawls of some Argentinian government sites, so looking at results by country will be somewhat skewed.

We have made many changes to how we do these wide crawls since this particular example, but we wanted to make the data available “warts and all” for people to experiment with. We have also done some further analysis of the content .

If you would like access to this set of crawl data, please contact us at info at archive dot org and let us know who you are and what you’re hoping to do with it. We may not be able to say “yes” to all requests, since we’re just figuring out whether this is a good idea, but everyone will be considered.

TIMESTAMPS

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20110925152623/http://www.international.ucla.edu/news/article.asp?parentid=121143

Home > News > Matthew Alexander on CBS Evening News with Whit Johnson

Matthew Alexander on CBS Evening News with Whit Johnson

Burkle Center Fellow, Matthew Alexander, appears on CBS Evening News to discuss the implications of enhanced interrogation and its role in providing critical intelligence necessary to prevent terrorism at home and abroad.

WHIT JOHNSON: On this Sunday talk shows, former Defense Secretary

Donald Rumsfeld, former Vice President Dick Cheney argued

enhanced-interrogation techniques played a major role in leading up to

the raid on bin Laden's compound.

DICK CHENEY (Fox News Sunday): So, it was a good program. It was a

legal program. It was not torture. And I would strongly recommend that

we continue it.

WHIT JOHNSON: At the heart of the controversy is a process called

waterboarding or simulated drowning, no longer practiced in the Obama

administration.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA (April 2009): I do believe that it is torture.

WHIT JOHNSON: Self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

was waterboarded one hundred eighty-three times. Between 2003 and

2004, Mohammed and another detainee, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, who was not

waterboarded, were questioned about a courier the CIA had learned

about from detainees in secret presence. Mohammad and al-Libbi both

lied about the courier, convincing the CIA he was important. After

years of intelligence gathering, from a variety of sources, that

courier ultimately led directly to the al Qaeda leader.

LEON PANETTA (CIA Director; May 3): The question that everybody will

always debate is whether or not those approaches had to be used in

order to get the same information. And that, frankly, is an open

question.

MATTHEW ALEXANDER (Former Senior Military Interrogator Operations Task

Force): I saw people using enhanced-interrogation techniques they

never worked.

WHIT JOHNSON: Author and former senior military interrogator Matthew

Alexander was involved in more than thirteen hundred interrogations in

Iraq in 2006. He says aggressive techniques are not only wrong, they

can be a waste of valuable time.

MATTHEW ALEXANDER: I watched a soldier, he grabbed a detainee that I

was interrogating and-- and began to choke him. And I had to

physically intervene to stop him and then my detainee quit talking.

To watch the original newscast, click here.

Burkle Center for International Relations

Date Posted: 5/9/2011

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Matthew Alexander on CBS Evening News with Whit Johnson

To watch the original newscast, click here.

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