GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Volume 12 ● Number 1 ● Winter/Spring 2010—Working the Dark Side Algeria as Template: Torture and Counter-Insurgency War
Obama’s approach to torture confines itself to prohibiting the practice without addressing its military, political, social and juridical contexts. This half-hearted stance is dictated not only by caution on the part of a new administration eager to avoid charges of endangering national security, but also by the requirements of counter-insurgency warfare. In light of the continued war in Afghanistan, which might involve committing additional US troops there, unabated strife in Iraq, and the US engagement in tracking down Taliban operatives in embattled Pakistan, torture cannot be controlled by its formal prohibition alone. After all, torture was already prohibited by law when the Bush administration revived it in 2002.
History provides numerous instances of countries that have found themselves in a similar situation to the United States today, and that allowed torture to acquire a life of its own. Among them are Britain, whose armies fought wars against decolonisation movements (i.e., counter-insurgency wars) in Kenya and Malaysia; and France, which fought to retain colonial control of Algeria. The French experience is a more compelling historical precursor of today’s torture controversy because the French Army developed a well articulated military doctrine which served as a model for other countries, including the United States. This paper analyses the relevance of the Algerian war for understanding the revival of torture by US military intelligence; it examines the discursive acceptance and normalisation of torture as a subject that can be debated publicly; and it considers the meanings of torture, as well as the prospects of its eradication. Revolutionary-War TheoryIn the mid-1950s, France was an embattled colonial power. It had been defeated at Dien Bien Phu by the Viet Minh in May 1954, was fighting a protracted anti-decolonisation war in Madagascar, and was about to negotiate an end to its protectorate over Morocco and Tunisia. More importantly, its prized possession, Algeria, where over one million French colonists resided, had also started a struggle for its independence.
The prospect of losing Algeria, after the loss of Vietnam, precipitated a debate among the French military (some of whose top brass had served in the Second World War and were still smarting from France’s surrender to Nazi Germany in 1940) on the meaning of the French empire and how to forestall its demise. A number of these officers had also served in Vietnam, where they had used torture against the nationalists, and studied the techniques of guerrilla warfare developed by the Viet Minh. The Cold War served as the ideological backdrop against which a number of French officers began to theorise the meaning of war in the post-1945 era. In addition, they sought to understand and draw military lessons from the success of the Chinese revolution led by Mao Ze Dong, whose writings they dissected. Their studies and observations culminated in the formulation of a coherent theory called guerre révolutionnaire, which was taught at the Ecole de Guerre in Paris to military and intelligence officers, some of whom hailed from countries outside France, including the United States, Israel and Latin American states.1
Simply described, revolutionary-war theory held that modern war after 1945 is a “new” type of war. It is subversive, fought not with regular armies but bands of guerrillas or people’s armies (as in China and Vietnam) which find refuge and support among the population, without which they cannot survive. The theory pointed to the guerrillas’ organisational structures and the psychological techniques they used in securing popular support.
However, the theory discounted the significance of a will to freedom or the capacity of populations to choose between antagonists in wars of decolonisation, or in civil wars. This allowed theorists to raise the spectre of an insidious transnational, purportedly communist-inspired, “revolutionary” movement bent upon the destruction of French-qua-“Western” values. From this perspective, colonial rule could be defined only as a bulwark against an immoral and shadowy adversary. Consequently, fighting “subversion” was not only a legitimate and worthy cause, but also a mission to save France as well as Europe from cultural destruction. The goal of keeping the alleged barbarism of “subversive” movements at bay dictated the methods with which to fight “revolutionary war”. The theory suggested that to combat “revolutionary war”, conventional armies must adjust their methods and adopt anti-subversive strategies that borrow from their adversaries. Revolutionary terror must be met with counter-revolutionary military terror.
The theory formed the foundation of a counter-insurgency doctrine featuring a combination of military operations adapted to guerrilla warfare, the provision of social services (such as healthcare and education) in “pacified” areas, and the isolation of entire rural villages from guerrillas. The doctrine specifically targeted the population as a war terrain, and defined the use of torture as a weapon of war. Counter-revolutionary (qua counter-insurgency) war takes place in and against the population, perceived at once as friend and enemy. Given the difficulty of distinguishing friends from enemies, torture emerged as a choice weapon for screening detainees. As Colonel Roger Trinquier, a revolutionary-war theorist put it, torture is an “antidote” to terrorism; it is a war weapon. Ironically, in order to “win the hearts and minds” of the population, it was necessary to use torture, which appeared as a means of redeeming the enemy—a notion sustained by French Catholic priests persuaded by the revolutionary-war theory. The French ExampleThe French Army professionalised and used torture as a method of interrogation in military tribunals. Although its existence was frequently denied by officials, torture was taught in “counter-guerrilla” warfare training centres. It was defined as being adapted to the special (and implicitly inferior) nature of its victims as Muslims and Arabs, and was exercised in a purportedly “humane” form: it was to be stopped as soon as a detainee talked and should not leave any trace. The implications of such a view of torture for the morale of French troops caused the Army to wage a psychological campaign in its own ranks to make the practice acceptable.
Military justice distinguished between “judicial” interrogation carried out by the military judge, and “operational” (or actionable) interrogation, the task of the intelligence officer. Relying on speed, “operational” interrogation dispensed with proof and thus used torture, frequently during operations, with portable torture equipment. In its psychological warfare, the Army also included torture as a preliminary step to brainwashing former combatants and turning them into auxiliaries of French troops or new colonial agents of pro-colonial propaganda. As the war dragged on, the normalisation of torture and the climate of terror which it sustained all but discredited the French military, in addition to further delegitimising the colonial state.
The historic ties that exist between the counter-insurgency techniques used by the French military and those deployed by the US Army in Afghanistan and Iraq are unmistakable. A number of the French officers involved in the formulation and implementation of revolutionary-war doctrine (such as colonels Roger Trinquier and Charles Lacheroy, or General Paul Aussaresses) taught their doctrine in US military schools in the 1950s and 1960s. The US officers learned from the French conception of counter-insurgency doctrine its integration of torture in a set of well-articulated military, psychological and social strategies. Torture no longer appeared to them a method of last resort; rather, it was a strategic imperative.
Like Algeria, Afghanistan and Iraq are primarily Muslim countries that have offered resistance to foreign invasion. The Pentagon has used Gillo Pontecorvo’s famous 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers, to show how urban guerrilla warfare is conducted and how it can be defeated (albeit temporarily). The use of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq was predicated on the same premisses as the French counter-insurgency doctrine: “terrorism” was defined by the Bush administration as a “new war”, requiring new methods of combat (of which torture is one).
Furthermore, torture is justified to nervous recruits as being suited to the nature of the enemy. Former US Army interrogator in Iraq, Tony Lagouranis, was taught about the assumed peculiarities of the “Arab mind” that make the torture of Iraqis picked up at random in military sweeps morally acceptable.2 The torture techniques used by the US Army and the CIA aimed to break down the resistance of detainees through a combination of psychological, physical and moral degradation; knowledge of the detainees’ culture was manipulated to enhance humiliation, as was the case in Algeria. However, the United States has an impressive body of research-based sensory-deprivation techniques which it had secretly developed during the Cold War, and has refined on Middle Eastern detainees.3 More importantly, the strategic use of torture as a means of displaying force, projecting power, intimidating, and exerting control has been evident in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as it was in Algeria. Lagouranis confirms that Iraqi men brought to his camp were routinely tortured for no other reason than that they were there. He bemoaned the fact that all the tortures he inflicted yielded little, if any, intelligence of value. Normalising TortureThere is, however, a difference in tone and public attitudes towards torture between France in the 1950s and the United States in the 2000s. The French military found ideological support in the Catholic right, as represented by Cité Catholique, an organisation that was politically extremist and theologically fundamentalist, as well as among the Chaplaincy, which oversaw priests ministering to the army. However, France’s leading intellectuals generally opposed the use of torture.
In the United States, torture became a topic of public discussion in the media before it was debated in Congress in 2006. Remarkably, it was not abhorrence of torture or alternatives to reviving this practice that occupied the discussions, but the conditions under which it was allegedly permissible, and in what specific forms. The intellectual acceptance of torture as a debatable issue rather than seeing it as a non-negotiable, absolutely unjustifiable practice in accordance with its prohibition by law was facilitated by the work of intellectuals such as Michael Walzer, Alan Dershowitz, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Ignatieff, and others. Each of these had justified the use of torture in exceptional circumstances, and thus had condoned its use discursively as a preliminary to its legalisation, as will be shown below. Already in 2002, secret memos had been exchanged between the Pentagon and the Army interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, authorising torture.4
The 2006 congressional debates took the form of a linguistic joust about how to qualify various degrees of pain. The debates represent an official recognition of torture as a legitimate method of interrogation. Stephen J. Hadley, a national-security adviser, aptly summarised the purpose of the debates: “The goal was whether we could find language mutually agreed between the Senate and the White House that would achieve those objectives [to meet our international obligations].” President Bush noted more bluntly that “The agreement [reached with Congress] clears the way to do what the American people want us to do: to capture terrorists, to detain terrorists, to question terrorists, and then to try them”.5 The debates were not about the permissibility of certain techniques of torture (such as waterboarding) and the prohibition of others, as might have appeared to be the case: they were about the normalisation of torture through its very discussion as a legitimate practice. By the time torture came to the fore in Congress, it had already been inflicted, defended in books, and accepted as a normal topic of discussion—but what was discussed was not the impermissibility of torture because of the pain and suffering it inflicts, but how and when torture can be used.
In hindsight, now that more classified documents have been released, the congressional debates were mere window-dressing. The severity of the abuse inflicted on detainees, some of whom were waterboarded innumerable times, speaks of an egregiously wanton disregard for human beings; broader violations of domestic and international law may yet be revealed. Such repeated abuse clearly casts doubt on the effectiveness of torture and might indicate a phenomenon similar one noticed during the Algerian war, when some torturers used their torture sessions as a pastime, to relieve boredom. In this respect, it is worth noting the addictive character of torture when it becomes routine.
It is seldom realised that techniques of interrogation allowed by the US Defence Department and described in its field manuals lend themselves to abuse and may in a broad sense amount to “cruel and unusual punishment”—prohibited by the US Constitution. The Field Manual on Human Intelligence (HUMINT), issued in 2006 after the Abu Ghraib torture revelations, points out that Article III of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War—which prohibits torture—constitutes one of the constraints that US Army interrogators must observe. However, the manual uses concrete examples drawn from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as illustrations of permissible interrogation techniques. By implication, the reinstitution of the legal prohibition of torture by the Obama administration is no guarantee that the methods described in HUMINT, used either singly or in combination, may not be torturous. Ultimately it is the interrogator who is in effect entrusted with the judicious use of physical or psychological techniques that are potentially abusive. A Failed MeasureDebates over the usefulness and effectiveness of torture continue unabated as more evidence of the abuse of detainees emerges in the United States and officials who ordered torture seek to defend their acts. Little attention is given to historical precedents such as that offered by the Algerian war. Ultimately, torture did not work in Algeria; it did not help to crush the nationalist movement. Did torture fail because the Algerian war was about decolonisation and because national liberation movements cannot be defeated as their aims are just? What appears in hindsight as the inexorable march of history towards freedom from domination was not perceived as such by the French Army and the colonists who supported it. They saw torture as a necessary, inevitable and justified means of fighting for what they believed France stood for: democracy, freedom, and European values, against the totalitarian communist enemy of the Cold War, regarded as the fomenter of anti-colonial movements.
How different is this from the present situation in Afghanistan? Admittedly, Algeria was a settler-colony of France; neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a colony of the United States, and thus any simple equation of the two with the Algeria of the 1950s would be misleading. Yet, what must be compared are not the formal trappings of possessing or not possessing a country, but the logic of domination, its ideological underpinnings, the methods used to project power and control, and the justifications provided for doing so. The Bush administration espoused the belief that the unchallengeable power of the United States gave it the ability and right to reshape the world in accordance with its interests and values; preventive war was embraced as a legitimate means of dealing with countries deemed to pose even the remotest potential threat to the United States; democracy, as defined by Washington, would be spread around the world—forcibly if necessary, and especially in the Middle East—as the best means of combating terrorism. This “Bush Doctrine” is the functional equivalent of France’s formalisation and legitimisation of its imperial ventures in a coherent theory. Revolutionary-war theory was the clearest and most elaborate statement of the “values” that gave impetus to French imperialism. The supremacist Bush Doctrine performs a similar ideological role in articulating the justifications and entitlements of the United States as the world’s sole superpower.
The methods of “pacification” used by the United States in both Iraq and Afghanistan are similar to those used by France in Algeria: search and destroy missions against “insurgents”, destruction of the environment in which the latter find support (the destruction of Fallujah is a case in point), the recruitment of a third party among the native population to act as auxiliaries. In this respect, the Iraq “awakening” movement, consisting of Sunni auxiliaries paid by the US military, was the functional equivalent of the “Harka” in Algeria. The Harka was an auxiliary corps of captured combatants of the Algerian independence movement, the National Liberation Front (FLN), who talked under torture and became torturers in their own right. They were largely unemployed rural men who were coerced or willingly agreed to form armed “self-defence” groups against the FLN.
As in Algeria, so in Afghanistan and Iraq the rural population is the terrain where occupying forces seek to win hearts and minds through the well-publicised provision of medical and other social services. The United States went further in this regard by enrolling anthropologists to facilitate contacts with tribal people and secure intelligence. By the same token, however, the population is also subject to bombings, arrest, and torture. US torture-centres where detainees languish for years, be it Bagram in Afghanistan or Abu Ghraib in Iraq, rival those in French Algeria such as Lambèse or Berrouaghia in the awe and revulsion they inspire in the native population.
Torture, however, remains the most common denominator between the French and American experiences. Its failure, whether acknowledged or dismissed, haunts those who ordered or condoned it in Iraq, and in the current war in Afghanistan. The Algerian war demonstrates that despite being systematically used, torture did not help to prevent individual acts of terror. It is difficult to ascertain whether it was torture or the forcible removal of some two million rural families into fortified villages under French military control and the establishment of no-man’s zones that gave the French Army the confidence to continue fighting. Yet, even in regrouped villages, placed under constant surveillance, torture was still inflicted upon a captive population. In the end, the Big Brother approach to security adopted by the French military did not rout the FLN and failed to keep Algeria in French hands. It is sometimes argued that the systematic use of torture during the erroneously named “battle” of Algiers succeeded in dismantling the FLN organisation in the Casbah.6 But it is not clear that the organisation would have remained intact if torture had not been used. The Casbah was sealed off from the rest of the city, making it easier to search houses and capture suspects without the use of torture. Enduring LessonsThe Algerian case is instructive because it demystifies torture:
First, torture is not an epiphenomenon of counter-insurgency wars, but a strategic imperative.
Second, torture is not about intelligence, although some useful intelligence is generally gathered through torture. It is about power, projecting an image of power through the use of force. The power afforded by torture is best seen in how it facilitates the brainwashing of victims.
Third, torture is a tool of terror (along with reprisals, summary executions, and random shooting into crowds).
Fourth, torture is not a series of discrete techniques that a torturer uses according to a manual or handbook. It a holistic situation, a system of methodical actions, a combination of techniques usually preceded by and interspersed with seemingly “minor” mistreatments such as kicks, punches, slaps, and ethnic and racial slurs. The purpose of these mistreatments is to soften up and/or keep the detainee under constant stress.
Fifth, torture cannot be stopped once it has been accepted as a method of interrogation. It represents absolute and addictive power wielded by the torturer over his victims. The relationship between the torturer and tortured is embedded in various political, cultural and ideational factors that impinge on the manner in which torture sessions are carried out.
Lastly, ordering or committing torture lends itself to infinite rationalisations and reveals a remarkable elasticity of conscience that seeks to conceal the inhumanity of torture with excuses such as obedience to orders or with expressions of merely formal regret. Hence, the importance of holding accountable those who order, facilitate, or inflict torture. In this, the United States is on a par with France: no one who ordered torture has been punished. Defending the IndefensibleWhen torture is demystified, it becomes clear that the justifications for it formulated by contemporary North American intellectuals are not compelling. In general, they are framed as an “ends justify the means” schema that gives the ends an urgency seldom, if ever, encountered in real life. The “ticking-bomb” scenario used by intellectuals such as Michael Walzer or Jean Bethke Elshtain is based not only on extreme hypothetical cases, but also on works of fiction. Walzer invokes Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Dirty Hands to buttress his argument that although torturing poses a “moral dilemma” and dirties the hands of the politician who orders it, it is nevertheless necessary. Elshtain uses a torture scene from the Hollywood film Marathon Man to determine which torture techniques are acceptable. She endorses the following measures, “torture lite” as delineated by Mark Bowden: “exposure to heat and cold, the use of drugs to cause confusion, rough treatment (slapping, shoving or shaking), [and] forcing a prisoner to stand for days at a time”.7 At least General Jacques Massu, a proponent of torture in Algeria, had himself tortured (clearly lightly) by General Paul Aussaresses before presuming to claim that torture is “tolerable” pain.
Michael Ignatieff, at least before he recanted his support for the US-led invasion of Iraq,8 made a case that it was permissible to contravene the democratic principles of the inviolability of the person and the rule of law in order to “save” democracy from “terrorists”. He hailed the establishment of an American “new imperialism”, thus situating torture in a nostalgic notion of empire in a manner made familiar by hard-line French colonial officers.9 Constructed in order to support states that torture, such justifications carry little conviction. What persuasiveness they have derives from arousing fears about terrorism, with torture being touted as the answer to such security threats. Torture-proponents fail to reflect that means can become ends in themselves. Their arguments obviate consideration of alternatives to torture, or of the destruction wrought by torture to the humanity of the individual (including that of the torturer himself). Defenders of torture imbue it with a moral content that it does not have, and represent ordering torture as a brave, indeed heroic act, a thankless but necessary task requiring courage to undertake. They further glorify a crime against human‑ness by turning it into a moral duty. Apologists for torture, just like French officers of the 1950s, fail to assess whether democracy can countenance torture unscathed.
Torture tears at the very fabric of a democratic political system. It is a throwback to the absolutist state and its absolute power over the body and mind of its subjects. The emergence of the democratic state signalled the establishment of laws limiting the state’s power over the individual. Torture is a source of pure power for the state, giving it an untrammelled freedom of action befitting an “emergency” or “exceptional” situation. Intellectual advocates of torture do not examine the meaning and potential abuse of the notion of an “exceptional” situation. Neither do they address the question of who is to decide what counts as such a situation. Nor do they consider the risk of the exception becoming a governing norm. And condoning torture may bring other violations of the rights of the citizen in its wake. The Bush administration passed the Patriot Act in 2001, reauthorising it in 2005 with few changes; the act strips the citizen of a number of protections from the intrusive power of the state, and leaves her defenceless.
In the end, the French Army’s systematic use of torture in Algeria and the Bush administration’s attempt to legalise the practice nearly half a century later indicate that torture is an ever-present danger. Its attractiveness lies in the immediacy of the absolute power that it gives its perpetrators, regardless of the quality or usefulness of the information they extract from their victims. If it took revolutions in Europe to put an end to the unlimited power of the state over the individual, it takes the democratic state to declare an “exceptional” situation to suspend hard-won laws. The political fiction of the “exception” and the ease with which it is invoked reveal the archaic, anti-democratic core of the democratic state which must be identified and removed. Without a relentless effort to do so, torture will recur, again and again.
2. Tony Lagouranis and Allen Mikaelian, Fear up Harsh: An Interrogator’s Dark Journey through Iraq (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 2007).
3. See Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Henry Holt, 2006).
4. See Philippe Sands, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), chap. 1.
5. George W. Bush, quoted in Marnia Lazreg, The Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 267.
6. The paratroop operation launched by General Jacques Massu in the Casbah in 1957 was not a “battle” but an attack on a civilian population in which an autonomous FLN cell found refuge.
7. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Reflection on the Problem of ‘Dirty Hands’ ”, in Torture: A Collection, ed. Sanford Levinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 85.
8. Michael Ignatieff, “Getting Iraq Wrong”, New York Times Magazine, 5 August 2007.
9. Michael Ignatieff, “The American Empire: The Burden”, New York Times Magazine, 5 January 2003.
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