counterrevolution.md

In Modern Warfare, Trinquier quietly but resolutely condoned torture. The
interrogations and related tasks were considered police work, as opposed to
military operations, but they had the exact same mission: the complete
destruction of the insurgent group. Discussing the typical interrogation of a
detainee, captured and suspected of belonging to a terrorist organization,
Trinquier wrote: “No lawyer is present for such an interrogation. If the prisoner
gives the information requested, the examination is quickly terminated; if not,
specialists must force his secret from him. Then, as a soldier, he must face the
suffering, and perhaps the death, he has heretofore managed to avoid.” Trinquier
described specialists forcing secrets out of suspects using scientific methods that
did not injure the “integrity of individuals,” but it was clear what those
“scientific” methods entailed. 4 As the war correspondent Bernard Fall suggests,
the political situation in Algeria offered Trinquier the opportunity to develop “a
Cartesian rationale” to justify the use of torture in modern warfare. 5
Similarly minded commanders championed the use of torture, indefinite
detention, and summary executions. They made no bones about it.

[...]

In his autobiographical account published in 2001, Services Spéciaux. Algérie
1955–1957, General Paul Aussaresses admits to the brutal methods that were the
cornerstone of his military strategy. 6 He makes clear that his approach to
counterinsurgency rested on a three-pronged strategy, which included first,
intelligence work; second, torture; and third, summary executions. The
intelligence function was primordial because the insurgents’ strategy in Algeria
was to infiltrate and integrate the population, to blend in perfectly, and then
gradually to involve the population in the struggle. To combat this insurgent
strategy required intelligence—the only way to sort the dangerous
revolutionaries from the passive masses—and then, violent repression. “The first
step was to dispatch the clean-up teams, of which I was a part,” Aussaresses
writes. “Rebel leaders had to be identified, neutralized, and eliminated discreetly.
By seeking information on FLN leaders I would automatically be able to capture
the rebels and make them talk.” 7
The rebels were made to talk by means of torture. Aussaresses firmly
believed that torture was the best way to extract information. It also served to
terrorize the radical minority and, in the process, to reduce it. The practice of
torture was “widely used in Algeria,” Aussaresses acknowledges. Not on every
prisoner, though; many spoke freely. “It was only when a prisoner refused to talk
or denied the obvious that torture was used.” 8
Aussaresses claims he was introduced to torture in Algeria by the policemen
there, who used it regularly. But it quickly became routine to him. “Without any
hesitation,” he writes, “the policemen showed me the technique used for
‘extreme’ interrogations: first, a beating, which in most cases was enough; then
other means, such as electric shocks, known as the famous ‘gégène’; and finally
water.” Aussaresses explains: “Torture by electric shock was made possible by
generators used to power field radio transmitters, which were extremely
common in Algeria. Electrodes were attached to the prisoner’s ears or testicles,
then electric charges of varying intensity were turned on. This was apparently a
well-known procedure and I assumed that the policemen at Philippeville [in
Algeria] had not invented it.” 9 (Similar methods had, in fact, been used earlier in
Indochina.)

Aussaresses could not have been more clear:

    The methods I used were always the same: beatings, electric shocks, and, in particular, water
    torture, which was the most dangerous technique for the prisoner. It never lasted for more than one
    hour and the suspects would speak in the hope of saving their own lives. They would therefore
    either talk quickly or never.

The French historian Benjamin Stora confirms the generalized use of torture.
He reports that in the Battle of Algiers, under the commanding officer, General
Jacques Massu, the paratroopers conducted massive arrests and “practiced
torture” using “electrodes […] dunking in bathtubs, beatings.” General Massu
himself would later acknowledge the use of torture. In a rebuttal he wrote in
1971 to the film The Battle of Algiers, Massu described torture as “a cruel
necessity.” 10 According to Aussaresses, torture was condoned at the highest
levels of the French government. “Regarding the use of torture,” Aussaresses

[...]

For Aussaresses, as for Roger Trinquier, torture and disappearances were
simply an inevitable byproduct of an insurgency—inevitable on both sides of the
struggle. Because terrorism was inscribed in revolutionary strategy, it had to be
used in its repression as well. In a fascinating televised debate in 1970 with the
FLN leader and producer of The Battle of Algiers, Saadi Yacef, Trinquier
confidently asserted that torture was simply a necessary and inevitable part of
modern warfare. Torture will take place. Insurgents know it. In fact, they
anticipate it. The passage is striking:

    I have to tell you. Whether you’re for or against torture, it makes no difference. Torture is a
    weapon that will be used in every insurgent war. One has to know that… One has to know that in
    an insurgency, you are going to be tortured.
    And you have to mount a subversive organization in light of that and in function of torture. It is
    not a question of being for or against torture. You have to know that all arrested prisoners in an
    insurgency will speak—unless they commit suicide. Their confession will always be obtained. So a
    subversive organization must be mounted in function of that, so that a prisoner who speaks does
    not give away the whole organization.16

“Torture?” asks the lieutenant aide de camp in Henri Alleg’s 1958 exposé
The Question. “You don’t make war with choirboys.” 18 Alleg, a French
journalist and director of the Alger républicain newspaper, was himself detained
and tortured by French paratroopers in Algiers. His book describes the
experience in detail, and in his account, torture was the inevitable product of
colonization and the anticolonial struggle. As Jean-Paul Sartre writes in his

[...]

In an arresting part of The Battle of Algiers it becomes clear that many of the
French officers who tortured suspected FLN members had themselves, as
members of the French Resistance, been victims of torture at the hands of the
Gestapo. It is a shocking moment. We know, of course, that abuse often begets
abuse; but nevertheless, one would have hoped that a victim of torture would
recoil from administering it to others. Instead, as Trinquier suggests, torture
became normalized in Algeria. This is, as Sartre describes it, the “terrible truth”:
“If fifteen years are enough to transform victims into executioners, then this
behavior is not more than a matter of opportunity and occasion. Anybody, at any
time, may equally find himself victim or executioner.” 20