Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad

[Al-khiyal]

Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad by Marnia Lazreg (U.K.)

Publication date: January 1, 2008

Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad by Marnia Lazreg (U.S.A.)

Publication date: December 20, 2007

***

Torture and the Twilight of Empire looks at the intimate relationship between torture and colonial domination through a close examination of the French army's coercive tactics during the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962. By tracing the psychological, cultural, and political meanings of torture at the end of the French empire, Marnia Lazreg also sheds new light on the United States and its recourse to torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. This book is nothing less than an anatomy of torture - its methods, justifications, functions, and consequences. Drawing extensively from archives, confessions by former torturers, interviews with former soldiers, and war diaries, as well as writings by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and others, Lazreg argues that occupying nations justify their systematic use of torture as a regrettable but necessary means of saving Western civilization from those who challenge their rule. She shows how torture was central to guerre révolutionnaire, a French theory of modern warfare that called for total war against the subject population and which informed a pacification strategy founded on brutal psychological techniques borrowed from totalitarian movements. Lazreg seeks to understand torture's impact on the Algerian population - especially women - and also on the French troops who became their torturers. She explores the roles Christianity and Islam played in rationalizing these acts, and the ways in which torture became not only routine but even acceptable. Written by a preeminent historical sociologist, Torture and the Twilight of Empire holds particularly disturbing lessons for us today as we carry out the War on Terror.

***

"This book interprets torture not as an incidental if frequent characteristic of neocolonial conflict, but as one of its major elements. Using the Algerian war as a case study, Lazreg argues that to the French forces the psychological and political significance of their policy of torture was far greater than its operational significance. Her work is certainly pertinent to the present."

~ Peter Paret, Institute for Advanced Study

"The premise of this book is excellent. Lazreg seeks to link the extensive use of torture to the demise of empire by means of two case studies, France in Algeria and the United States in Iraq. Her analysis is a theoretical psychohistory in which she uses her archival research to extrapolate on the psychology that motivates the torturer and to theorize about state terror."

~ Patricia Lorcin, University of Minnesota

[Al-khiyal]

History repeats itself: France in Algeria, the U.S. in Iraq

by Marnia Lazreg

Professor of Sociology at Hunter College and Graduate Center City University of New York

December 3, 2007 -- The disclosure by the New York Times on October 4, 2007, of Alberto Gonzales’s secret memo authorizing torture and President Bush’s public acknowledgment on October 6, 2007, that “interrogation” is necessary to obtain “actionable intelligence,” starkly reveal the logical thread that ties wars of occupation together. The Viet Nam war has often been invoked in making sense of the Administration’s involvement in Iraq, yet the Algerian War is a better model for understanding the US military strategy and a better predictor of its evolution. Apart from the Pentagon finding The Battle of Algiers a useful training tool, the French anti-subversive war methods were taught at Fort Bragg in the 1960’s as Algeria was gaining its independence, by no other than General Aussaresses, the self-confessed torturer and architect, with General Massu, of the generalized use of torture in Algiers in 1957.

Mr. Gonzales defined the war in Iraq (and Afghanistan) as a “new war” against a rogue or “failed state” that justified the use of new methods of interrogation of which torture is an essential part. This justification of torture has a much longer history than is fathomed. The French military had defined the war of decolonization started by the Algerian FLN in 1954 as a “new war,” or guerre révolutionnaire, a subversive war concocted by international communism acting by proxy to destabilize western democracies.

Even though invoking Al Qaeda as an international threat may be more compelling today than the communist boogie man of the Cold War, the reasoning behind the justification of war and torture is the same. French anti-subversive war strategists modeled their methods after those of the Algerian guerillas (which they felt resembled the Viet Minh’s). Combat troops thus became indistinguishable from their elusive enemy in mobility, stealth, determination, and tactics; they fought terror with terror. A theorist of guerre révolutionnaire, Roger Trinquier, flatly declared torture to be “the antidote to terrorism.”

The adoption of guerilla tactics by a regular army accustoms troops to the use of unrestrained force in violation of international conventions, fosters contempt for the civilian population, and flaunts civil control over military actions. Indeed, torture demands that intelligence officers have free reign, unencumbered by considerations of civil rights and due process. More importantly, its defense requires civil authorities to define political issues in military terms, and thus lose sight of the political and social consequences of their decisions.

Torture became systematic during the Algerian War, and “humane torture” was taught as part of the training troops received in “counter-guerilla” techniques. Humane torture is “clean,” that is, “it does not leave any trace; does not take place in presence of young soldiers or sadists; is not inflicted by an officer or a person of rank; and must end as soon as the suspect has talked.” Electricity and water-boarding were presented as perfectly clean techniques. Unlike Mr. Mukasey or Mr. Giuliani who, when asked whether they would condone water-boarding and electricity, distinguished between “legal” and illegal techniques, French strategists understood that “humane” torture was nevertheless torture, and that it was illegal. Wishing to demonstrate that torture was no big deal, General Massu had himself tortured by his sidekick, General Aussaresses, who nevertheless went easy on his superior. Military tribunals gave priority to “operational interrogation,” which relied on speed and efficiency. Captured combatants were thus tortured on the spot with portable equipment during military operations. As an officer put it, intelligence is a “form of combat.”

What the administration is missing from its reading of the Algerian War, however, are two important lessons:

1- When torture is condoned by the state as a legitimate combat tool, it acquires a life of its own, and can no longer be justified in terms of “actionable intelligence.” Furthermore, the use of torture has unintended consequences: it gives the officer an overconfident sense of unlimited power; perverts the stated values of the Army, and makes it dependent on an easy (it is easy to torture a suspect tied to a chair) source of dubious intelligence.

2- Anti-subversive wars are fought in and against the population. They consequently cannot win the people’s hearts and minds as occupying forces seldom distinguish a peaceful native from a “terrorist,” and must subject innocent people to torture.

French strategists offered health and education services to the rural populations to secure their loyalty. However, the institutions that delivered these services, the Sections Administratives Spécialisées (SAS), also used them to gather intelligence with torture, and control regrouped villagers from whom food was frequently withheld in exchange for information. The recent decision by the US Military to use anthropologists to help in the pacification of the rural Afghan population harks back to the French SAS. French psychological warfare experts used the combined knowledge of anthropologists, historians, Islamicists and Arabists in designing their soft and hard propaganda, (forcibly) unveiling women, and designing torture techniques that exploited their assumed cultural knowledge of Algerians. However, occupation rests on force and the projection of an image of force. Since the population “friend-enemy” was a war front, doctors, teachers and social workers were unable to give it a peaceful face.

By the end of the Algerian war, France had committed half a million men to fight a losing battle. The American “surge” in Iraq, means the use of more repressive methods, reminiscent of Massu’s attacks on the Casbah. In the end, the lesson to learn from the Algerian war is not how to adapt and refine French anti-subversive war methods, but to follow France’s example: leave.

[Al-khiyal]

La torture et le déclin de l’empire colonial : d’Alger à Baghdad

Lundi 31 Décembre 2007 -- Marnia Lazreg, spécialiste de la question des femmes et de la société algérienne et arabe, professeur de sociologie à Hunter College et au Graduate Center de la City University of New York, aux Etats-Unis, vient de publier l’un de ses derniers travaux universitaires consacré à la torture, sous le titre Torture and the Twilight of Empire : from Algiers to Baghdad (la Torture et le déclin de l’empire colonial : d’Alger à Baghdad).

Au moment où les Etats-Unis sont plongés dans le scandale de la destruction de cassettes vidéo montrant des interrogatoires musclés menés par des agents de la CIA contre de présumés terroristes, la publication de l’universitaire algérienne, installée aux Etats-Unis, braque les projecteurs sur les pratiques inhumaines de l’armée française en Algérie comme la torture et les massacres collectifs qu’une certaine opinion française a toujours tenté de cacher ou de renier, mais aussi de l’armée américaine, en Irak et en Afghanistan.

Elle démontre que la torture était un élément central d’une théorie française qui préconisait une guerre totale contre la population soumise et qui était la source d’«une stratégie de pacification fondée sur des techniques psychologiques brutales empruntés aux régimes totalitaires».

La publication décortique la relation étroite entre la torture et le système de domination coloniale à travers un examen minutieux des méthodes et des tactiques coercitives de l’armée française pendant la guerre d’Algérie, ou de l’armée d’occupation américaine, en Irak et en Afghanistan. L’étude souligne aussi des aspects inquiétants de la «war on terror» (guerre contre la terreur) dans laquelle le monde d’aujourd’hui est plongé et engagé malgré lui.

La sociologue tente aussi d’appréhender l’impact de la torture sur les populations algériennes, plus spécialement les femmes, mais aussi sur les soldats français qui en étaient les auteurs. Elle explore le rôle de la religion dans la rationalisation de ces actes, et les méthodes par lesquelles la torture est devenue non seulement un phénomène routinier mais aussi une pratique acceptée.

Selon les critiques, ce livre n’est ni plus ni moins qu’une «anatomie de la torture» et une analyse de ses méthodes, justifications, fonctions supposées ou réelles et conséquences. Marnia Lazreg s’est appuyée, pour la rédaction de son étude, sur des archives, des témoignages de personnes victimes de tortures, des confessions de tortionnaires, des entretiens avec d’anciens soldats, des témoignages de guerre, des reportages et des enquêtes de journalistes ou d’universitaires, ainsi que des écrits de certains penseurs et intellectuels, notamment les Français Jean-Paul Sartre et Albert Camus.