The National Interest

THE GRISLY subject of torture is back with us again, with fresh allegations of CIA misconduct. It is a subject which first came to occupy my thoughts when I was writing a book on the Algerian War, A Savage War of Peace, back in the 1970s. It has never left me. In the course of my researches in France, one of the men I came most to respect, Paul Teitgen, former French prefect of Algiers, remarked to me:

All our so-called civilisation is covered with a varnish. Scratch it, and underneath you find fear. The French . . . are not torturers by nature. But when you see the throats of your copains [buddies] slit, then the varnish disappears.

Teitgen was a thoroughly honorable man, and he has surely been proved a wise one since 9/11.

AT THE height of the French-Algerian War, good American liberals were appalled and disgusted by revelations of torture by the French army. The pack was led by then-Senator John F. Kennedy, who called for every kind of sanction against France. In the event, possibly as much as any other single factor, it was the reaction against la torture, across the world and within Metropolitan France itself, that won the war for the Algerians—though, when it came to atrocities, their hands were by no means spotless. Yet, when 9/11 struck, out of horror at what had been perpetrated, many of those good Americans who had so vigorously opposed torture as practiced by the French in Algeria stifled their qualms and at best averted their gazes from excesses committed in Guantánamo, waterboarding within the homeland or rendition abroad for other less squeamish regimes to do what was necessary. Or they more actively supported the Rumsfeld-Cheney line for the extraction of information at any cost.

The same phenomena were witnessed in my country after the murderous bombings in London of July 2005, as fear raised its head. One almost-immediate response was the shooting on the London Tube of an utterly innocent Brazilian by trigger-happy and frightened cops. A close relative of mine in England, a man whom I respect for his liberal-mindedness, now expresses himself in favor of interrogation under torture—given certain circumstances: i.e., when the authorities are convinced that it might avert a terrible atrocity. We argue vigorously. Can one trust even the finest brains in the CIA or MI-5 ever to be absolutely sure about a culprit?

I WAS lecturing in Camden, South Carolina, when the news of Abu Ghraib first broke. Nobody around me seemed to pay much attention. But I was appalled. It was not just my naive belief, since childhood days in the U.S. of A., that Americans simply did not do this kind of thing, but a much more chilling warning of the consequences—notably in terms of the adverse propaganda presented to the cause of Islamic fundamentalism. Now, in retrospect, I shudder to think how many lives of allied soldiers, of hostages, this one act of abuse may have caused. It was a grotesque abuse that wasn’t even torture, but done purely for personal gratification, for kicks; in a way, that made it worse, because it didn’t even have the purpose of gaining intelligence. But the insult to Islam, fanned by organs like Al Jazeera, was immense—and immediate, as I feared it would be. It was like handing al-Qaeda, free and gratis, a new and lethal secret weapon. Given the speed of modern communications, it was a weapon that would flash across the breadth of the Muslim world with the speed of light. Muslims would know that the West was fighting a dirty war—and respond accordingly.

The Battle of Algiers

By the beginning of 1957, France’s war against the Algerian rebels was entering its third year. With some half-a-million men deployed in the country, the French army was not doing well. The war had moved from the countryside, the bled, to the city of Algiers. It was a challenge (brilliantly portrayed in that classic movie, The Battle of Algiers) that was likely to prove decisive in the conflict, to whomever emerged in the ascendant. In command of the French forces in Algiers, the elite 10th Division, was a tough para (paratrooper) general, Jacques Massu, who had led troops in the 1944 liberation of Paris and seen France defeated thrice—in 1940 by the Nazis, then in Indochina and finally humiliated during the abortive Suez operation of 1956. Massu and his paras were determined that Algeria would be the end of the line of French defeats. A totally up-front soldier, when I interviewed him he made no bones about the use of torture and for much of the remainder of his life remained unrepentant, declaring torture to have been “a cruel necessity”; there had been “no other option.”

In his last year, however, then in his nineties, Massu seemed to recant, admitting that in Algiers torture had been “institutionalized,” and that it had been “the worst thing.” He had come to the final conclusion that it was “not indispensable in time of war, we could have gotten along without it very well.” Among the troops under his command was also the French foreign legion, comprised of many Germans—some of whom had served in the wartime Wehrmacht and knew a thing or two about gestapo methods, as often as not under l’occupation itself. The officers of the Légion had also served in Indochina and were equally determined not to countenance defeat yet again in Algeria—at all costs. Under Massu the city was split up into a “block-warden system,” similar to Nazi measures in wartime Paris.

So, in consequence, la torture became more or less ritualized during the Battle of Algiers, accompanied with summary executions—and the “disappearance” of the victims. One estimate puts the numbers of the latter at around three thousand by the end of 1957 alone—or approximate to the number of desaparacidos under Chile’s Pinochet. There was dark talk, in slang, of “work in the woods”; of bodies dropped out in the sea from helicopters; of mass graves; of the killing by suffocation of forty detainees locked up in wine cellars in Oran. There were suspicious suicides: such as that of a prominent young Algerian lawyer, Ali Boumendjel, who threw himself out of a window “to escape interrogation.” The comment of a French colonel in charge was that either “he had wished to die for the cause, or was deranged in his mind.”

On the statute books of France, torture—in reaction against the horrors perpetrated under the monarchy, the rack and the wheel—had, in theory, been banned since the Revolution of 1789, and Algeria had been made a full-blooded province of Metropolitan France. Given their own hideous experiences under German occupation from 1940–44, to no people was torture more abhorrent. But under the brutal circumstances that confronted Frenchmen in Algeria, including appalling atrocities committed by the National Liberation Front (FLN)—a terrorist group that was fighting this French “occupation”—against women and children as well as captured soldiers, the “varnish” had been well and truly scratched off. In an official report as early as 1955, the second year of the war, the “enhanced interrogation” which accompanied la question was defined:

The water and electricity methods, provided they are carefully used, are said to produce a shock which is more psychological than physical and therefore do not constitute excessive cruelty . . . I am inclined to think that these procedures can be accepted and that, if used in the controlled manner described to me, they are no more brutal than deprivation of food, drink, and tobacco, which has always been accepted. . . . [author’s italics]

This was not a view that would be shared by Algerians subjected to the gégène, electrodes attached to their genitals, or having their bellies pumped full of water from a hosepipe—a primitive form of waterboarding. One French writer described a procedure:

The first of tortures consisted of suspending the two men completely naked by their feet, their hands bound behind their backs, and plunging their heads for a long time into a bucket of water to make them talk. The second torture consisted of suspending them, their hands and feet tied behind their backs, this time with their head upwards. Underneath them was placed a trestle, and they were made to swing, by fist blows, in such a fashion that their sexual parts rubbed against the very sharp pointed bar of the trestle. The only comment made by the men, turning towards the soldiers present: “I am ashamed to find myself stark naked in front of you.

Shades of Abu Ghraib!

ALTHOUGH NOT even Frenchmen were immune to la question, there was undoubtedly an element of racism involved. One of de Gaulle’s most distinguished subordinates in the wartime Free French Forces, made up of soldiers that continued to fight the Axis powers even after France’s surrender, François Coulet (who also commanded a unit in Algeria) admitted to me that the army had come to regard a prisoner as “no longer an Arab peasant,” but simply as “a source of intelligence.” And “Intelligence,” echoed one of the leading para colonels, Yves Godard, “is capital.” Tacit support for torture was shared at the highest levels. When I interviewed him in the French senate in the ’70s, Senator Robert Lacoste, the onetime governor general of Algeria, belittled the effect of the gégène. Disquietingly placing his hand on my thigh, he remarked cozily how it was “nothing serious. Just connecting little electrodes. And Massu’s paras were, after all, des garcons très sportifs!”

What it was really like for the less sportifs victims was vividly described by Henri Alleg, one of the Jewish settlers in Algeria, in his book The Question, which profoundly shocked France when published in 1958. On his first subjection to the gégène, with electrodes attached merely to his ear and finger, Alleg records “a flash of lightning exploded next to my ear and I felt my heart racing in my breast.”

On a further, more powerful application, “instead of the sharp and rapid spasms that seemed to tear my body in two, it was now a greater pain that took possession of all my muscles and tightened them in longer spasms.”

Put to the water torture, in his mouth was placed a hose, with his nose stopped up: “I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself. . . .”

The depth of degradation came with the sexual abuses of young Muslim women, while almost worse were the screams of the other suspects; Alleg recorded the horror of one elderly Algerian hoping to appease his tormentors: “Between the terrible cries which the torture forced out of him, he said, exhausted: ‘Vive la France! Vive la France!’”

Of all the apologists for most extreme measures against the Algerians whom I interviewed was a doctor—a doctor no less—who immigrated to Paris after the war. Quite one of the nastiest men I have ever met, he boasted to me till the small hours of one morning of his activities; of how he would tend his pied noirs (slang for the French settlers in Algeria) in his surgery in the morning, and then “go out in the evening, and blow off the legs of a few FLN.” (When, under pressure from a British libel lawyer, I asked him to confirm his remarks in writing, he promptly disavowed them.)

YET NOT everyone was to become an apologist. Slowly, dissent and discord would rise. General Jacques de la Bollardière, a distinguished senior officer, highly decorated for his courage during World War II and sentenced to death in absentia by the collaborationist Vichy regime, was one such voice. In Algeria, de la Bollardière was outraged to overhear a young cavalry officer commending Nazi practices. He protested to Massu against the policy of torture, requesting to be posted back to France. There, in March 1957—the year of the Battle of Algiers—he wrote a powerful letter to L’Express, a journal which, under Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who later became the head of the Radical Party in France, had already become the voice of protest against the war. He pointed eloquently to:

The terrible danger there would be for us to lose sight, under the fallacious pretext of immediate expediency, of the moral values which alone have, up till now, created the grandeur of our civilisation and of our army.

For this fundamental breach of military discipline, the general was sentenced to sixty days “fortress arrest,” the most severe punishment meted out to any senior officer in the Algerian War to date.

About the same time as this, however, Governor General Lacoste received a letter of resignation from an even more influential figure, Paul Teitgen, the prefect of Algiers. Teitgen, whom I quoted at the outset of this article, had himself been a hero of France’s wartime Resistance, deported by the gestapo to Dachau, where he was tortured on no less than nine separate occasions. A Communist, Fernand Yveton, had been caught red-handed placing a bomb in the Algiers gasworks where he was employed. But a second bomb had not been discovered, and if it had exploded and set off tanks containing vast quantities of gas, thousands of lives in the densely inhabited city might have been lost. Nothing would induce Yveton to reveal its whereabouts, and Teitgen was pressed by his chief of police to have Yveton passé à la question. Teitgen described to me vividly how he had agonized over his dilemma:

But I refused to have him tortured. I trembled the whole afternoon. Finally the bomb did not go off. Thank God I was right. Because if you once get into the torture business, you’re lost. . . . Understand this, fear was the basis of it all. . . .

In March 1957, Teitgen offered his resignation, writing, “for the past three months we have been engaged . . . in irresponsibility which can only lead to war crimes.” In the course of his duties he had visited two detention centers where he had recognized on detainees “profound traces of the cruelties and tortures that I had personally suffered fourteen years ago in the gestapo cellars.” He feared that “France risks losing her soul through equivocation.”

Teitgen and Bollardière were not the only voices raised against the institutionalization of torture in Algeria. Gr adually, and progressively, feelings of outrage were being aired in France. But because of the slowness of communication—there was no internet and only primitive TV—it was a lengthy process. As the full story emerged, it hit the country like an avalanche. La torture may have won a transient victory in the Battle of Algiers in the intelligence it produced but, in the longer run, coupled with protests abroad, it lost the war for France. And the eight-year war ended as a total defeat—on the scale of Vietnam.

As a point for the record, back in 2005, at the suggestion of Rumsfeld’s staff, I left in the Pentagon a copy of A Savage War of Peace for the secretary of defense. To save a busy man leafing through all six hundred pages, I sidelined certain key passages which I felt relative to the debate about Abu Ghraib that was then under way—and particularly regarding its potent propaganda danger in the Arab world at large. I received a flea in my ear, couched in inimitable Rumsfeld terms: “As you well know, we do not torture. . . .” I put to him my fear, and how swiftly substantiated it was, that—whereas, in the Algerian War, the impact of torture only hit headlines slowly—because of the speed of modern-day communication, the effect of Abu Ghraib would be instant, and devastating. It was.

WAS TORTURE ever effective? The experience of the gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst in occupied France would indicate the opposite, as suspects would concoct any story to stop the torture; more recently, one can recall a heroic John McCain; when asked under torture by the Vietminh to give the names of his squadron, he blithely trotted out the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line. What might it be expected to achieve with an Islamic suicide bomber, already dedicated to martyrdom?

As far as Algeria is concerned, one could almost rest one’s case with the experiences of Paul Teitgen. Yet even Massu’s chief practitioner of the acquisition of intelligence in the Battle of Algiers, Colonel Godard, was later to admit, “There is no need to torture. . . .”

That superb writer, and great humanist, Albert Camus (himself a pied noir) declared:

Torture has perhaps saved some at the expense of honour, by uncovering thirty bombs, but at the same time it has created fifty new terrorists, who, operating in some other way and in another place, would cause the death of even more innocent people.

He would add: “it is better to suffer certain injustices than to commit them,” while—with poignant accuracy—he predicted that “such fine deeds would inevitably lead to the demoralisation of France and the loss of Algeria.”

How Americans might have wished that Donald Rumsfeld and his CIA allies could have read these words before Guantánamo, or Abu Ghraib!

The poisons in the system left by torture persisted long after the war itself had ended. Lingering, and pernicious, neuroses were found among its victims. But also the torturers themselves suffered—and continue to suffer. There were numerous cases, such as that of the police inspector found guilty of torturing his own wife and children, who in defense claimed it came in consequence of what he had been required to do to Algerian suspects: “the thing that kills me most is the torture. You just don’t know what it’s like, do you?”

The high dignitary sent by de Gaulle to negotiate the final peace settlement, Louis Joxe, told me: “I shall never forget the young officers and soldiers whom I met who were absolutely appalled by what they had to do.”

That was back in 1962.

Meanwhile, in contemporary France, in psychiatric wards, still today many cases are being treated of those called on to inflict torture during a war of now fifty years past. All the evidence indicates that it ends by corrupting the torturer as much as it breaks its victim. Even de Gaulle, speaking to a brave woman who had also been subjected to torture as a leading member of the Résistance, Germaine Tillion (she died only last year, aged one hundred), confided to her that the horrors of abuses in Algeria had persuaded him of the need to end the war: “This proves that one must talk,” he said.

IN 1968 France passed an amnesty for all crimes, by French and Algerians alike, committed during the war. It was a wise and sensible measure. In the ongoing debate in the United States, one can only agree with President Obama’s declaration that the country should be “looking forward, not backward.” Is there any purpose in pursuing members of the CIA now for acts they committed on the honest assumption that they were acting responsibly under regulations prescribed by the previous government? To do so would threaten to eviscerate all intelligence operations, as well as utterly demoralize serving officers. Nuremberg precedents seem hardly relevant. On the other hand, it may be desirable for former–Vice President Cheney to be pressured into expanding on specific cases where, he claims, “enhanced interrogation” did prevent acts of terrorism.

If, as suggested, interrogation procedures in the United States are now to be handed over to the FBI, will this make them necessarily either more effective or more abuse-proof? How will these “interrogation squads” be recruited—from among the Episcopalian clergy?

One aspect that continues to arouse most controversy in Britain is “rendition.” If a case can be made out for interrogation requiring Islamic expertise, then so be it. But if, on the other hand, it is done as the calling upon other cultures to carry out procedures distasteful in the West, then it is sheer cowardice, deserving of total contempt and prohibition.

There may well be a case for a redefining of what constitutes torture. Subjecting a suspect to threats of mutilation by an electric drill, or to threats that his wife will be raped, or his family murdered, is obscene—but surely not torture, unless the threats are actually carried out? More to the point, is “sleep deprivation,” strictly speaking, torture? It was—if combined with the physical abuse that seems to have accompanied it under post-9/11 procedures. During World War II it was used, scientifically and without such physical maltreatment, most effectively against German agents by Britain’s MI-5. I would support some redefinition here.

But the danger, to my mind, is that the most restricted permissive clause in the principle of “No Torture” leaves a gap for the brute, the would-be torturer within us all, to rush in. Setting morality aside, the Algerian War, and every other instance, has proved that to resort to torture is both ineffective and counterproductive. My own message is a simple one: No. Never. Under any circumstances. Then, at least, the law can be clear and unambiguous. Otherwise what Prefect Teitgen called the “varnish of civilisation” disappears.

Alistair Horne’s Kissinger: 1973, The Crucial Year is published by Simon & Schuster. His A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954–62, was reissued by New York Review of Books Classics in 2006, with a new preface updating it to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.