There's one scene in The Battle of Algiers, a classic 1965 film by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo about the Algerian insurgency against the French, that really made me queasy.
The elegant, eloquent, ruthless Lt.-Col. Philippe Mathieu is addressing a news conference.
"There's been a lot of talk, not only of the paratroopers' success, but also of the methods they're said to use," a reporter asked him.
"Their success is a result of these methods," he said sharply, with classic Gallic certainty. "One depends on the other."
A second reporter jumps in. "It seems, perhaps due to an excess of caution, that my colleagues keep asking you indirect questions to which you can only respond in a round-about way.
"It would be better to call a spade a spade, so let's talk about torture."
Mathieu: "I understand. And you: You have no question?"
Second reporter: "They've all been asked. I'd just like more precise answers."
Mathieu -- hands on his hips, sunglasses over his eyes -- then responds with a pseudo-directness you generally don't see in modern military men ... er, Gen. Rick Hillier's words about "detestable scumbags" aside:
Let us be precise. The word "torture" isn't used in our orders. We use interrogation as the only valid police method against clandestine activity. The FLN (Note: The French acronym for the National Liberation Front, it was a socialist party with Islamic overtones) asks all its members, in case of capture, to remain silent for 24 hours. Then they may talk. This gives the FLN time to render any information useless.
And us? What form of questioning must we adopt? Civil law procedures, which may take months for a mere misdeameanour?
"Legality can be inconvenient," observed the journalist.
Is it legal to set off bombs in public places? Remember (Larbi) Ben M'hidi's answer when you asked him the question.
No gentlemen, believe me, it's a vicious circle.
Taking off his sunglasses and sitting on a desk, Mathieu expanded his views:
We could talk for hours to no avail, because that isn't the problem. The problem is this: The FLN wants to throw us out of Algeria, and we want to stay.
Even with slight shades of opinion, you all agree that we must stay. When the FLN began (three years earlier), there were no shades at all. Every paper, the communist press included, wanted it crushed.
We're here for that reason alone. We're neither madmen nor sadists. Those who call us fascists forget the role many of us played in the Resistance. Those who call us Nazis don't know that some of us survived Dachau and Buchenwald.
We are soldiers. Our duty is to win.
Playing with his sunglasses in his hand, Mathieu took a few steps towards the reporters.
It is my turn to ask a question: Should France stay in Algeria? If your answer is still yes, then you must accept all the consequences.
We then soundlessly see those consequences as funereal music plays in the background: A man's mouth is jammed open with a piece of wood before he is placed under a running faucet so the water can reach his lungs, a man is repeatedly dunked to the point of drowning while his family looks on. Other variations include hog-tying a man to a board and suspending him in a position guaranteed to cause excruciating pain (what today's Pentagon would call a "stress position") and burning a man's chest with a blow torch. Sorry: I forgot the electric shocks.
This strategy works -- sort of. The FLN is brought to heel.
The movie opens with the tail end of a torture sequence, in which a broken man gives up the hiding place of Ali La Pointe, the last uncaptured leader of the FLN -- a tear running down his cheek as he does so.
It almost ends when La Pointe and three others are blown up in a Casbah apartment.
The French military leaders see that act as crushing the head of the tape worm -- earlier, Mathieu told his men so long as a tapeworm's head is intact, the creature can grow and recreate itself indefinitely.
"The FLN is decapitated in Algiers. We'll hear no more of it," a general told Mathieu.
"They're basically decent people. We got on fine for 130 years," said a third officer about the Algerians.
However, the insurgency continued outside Algiers.
And roughly two years later, in December 1960, massive demonstrations started springing up -- much to the surprise of both the FLN and the French.
On Dec. 21, 1960, a French soldier yells into a mist-shrouded crowd: "What do you want?"
"Independence!" "Our pride!" "We want our freedom!"
On July 2, 1962, they got it.
The words of Larbi Ben H'Midi, during a rooftop conversation with La Pointe back in 1957 (in film time) were also interesting:
Acts of violence don't win wars. Neither wars nor revolutions. Terrorism is useful as a start, but then the people themselves must act. That is the rationale behind this strike (the FLN called for a seven-day national strike in February 1957): To mobilize all Algerians, to assess our strength. ... It may not do any good, but at least the UN will be able to gauge our strength.
You know, Ali, it's hard enough to start a revolution, even harder to sustain it -- and hardest of all to win it. But it's only afterward, once we've won, that the real difficulties begin.
When he was captured a few weeks later, Ben H'Midi had this to say to reporters, in response to a question about whether or not the FLN could win:
The FLN has more of a chance of defeating the French army than the French have of changing the course of history.
Ben H'Midi was later found dead in in his cell, victim of an apparent hanging -- even though he had been ordered to be bound hand and foot.
The modern era
The invasion of Iraq gave this film a new lease on life, especially when the Pentagon held a special screening one day in 2003 -- ironic, because lefty revolutionary wannabes watched it in the 1960s.
Here's an excerpt from an NYT article posted to the Rialto Pictures website:
As the flier inviting guests to the Pentagon screening declared: "How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Children shoot soldiers at point-blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film."
The idea came from the Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, which a Defense Department official described as a civilian-led group with "responsibility for thinking aggressively and creatively" on issues of guerrilla war. The official said, "Showing the film offers historical insight into the conduct of French operations in Algeria, and was intended to prompt informative discussion of the challenges faced by the French." He added that the discussion was lively and that more showings would probably be held.
No details of the discussion were provided but if the talk was confined to the action of the film it would have focused only on the battle for the city, which ended in 1957 in apparent triumph for the French with the killing of La Pointe and the destruction of the network. But insurrection continued throughout Algeria, and though the French won the Battle of Algiers, they lost the war for Algeria, ultimately withdrawing from a newly independent country ruled by the F.L.N. in 1962.
During the last four decades the events re-enacted in the film and the wider war in Algeria have been cited as an effective use of the tactics of a "people's war," where fighters emerge from seemingly ordinary lives to mount attacks and then retreat to the cover of their everyday identities. The question of how conventional armies can contend with such tactics and subdue their enemies seems as pressing today in Iraq as it did in Algiers in 1957. In both instances the need for on-the-ground intelligence is required to learn of impending attacks. Even in a world of electronic devices, human infiltration and interrogations remain indispensable, but how far should modern states go in the pursuit of such information?
Mr. Pontecorvo, who was a member of the Italian Communist Party, obviously felt the French had gone much too far by adopting policies of torture, brutal intimidation and outright killings. Though their use of force led to the triumph over La Pointe, it also provoked political scandals in France, discredited the French Army and traumatized French political life for decades, while inspiring support for the nationalists among Algerians and in much of the world. It was this tactical tradeoff that lies at the heart of the film and presumably makes it relevant for Pentagon study and discussion.
The article goes on to mention the conflicting retrospective views of Gen. Jacques Massu (the principal model for Mathieu), France's commanding officer in Algeria at the time, and Paul Aussaresses, his second-in-command:
In 1971, General Massu wrote a book challenging"The Battle of Algiers," and the film was banned in France for many years. In his book General Massu, who had been considered by soldiers the personification of military tradition, defended torture as "a cruel necessity." He wrote: "I am not afraid of the word torture, but I think in the majority of cases, the French military men obliged to use it to vanquish terrorism were, fortunately, choir boys compared to the use to which it was put by the rebels. The latter's extreme savagery led us to some ferocity, it is certain, but we remained within the law of eye for eye, tooth for tooth."
In 2000, his former second in command, Gen. Paul Aussaresses, acknowledged, showing neither doubts nor remorse, that thousands of Algerians "were made to disappear," that suicides were faked and that he had taken part himself in the execution of 25 men. General Aussaresses said "everybody" knew that such things had been authorized in Paris and he added that his only real regret was that some of those tortured died before they revealed anything useful.
As for General Massu, in 2001 he told interviewers from Le Monde, "Torture is not indispensable in time of war, we could have gotten along without it very well." Asked whether he thought France should officially admit its policies of torture in Algeria and condemn them, he replied: "I think that would be a good thing. Morally, torture is something ugly."
Other resources about the film
A review from The Guardian.
A trailer at apple.com.
The Wikipedia page -- it says an American remake is being considered one that would star Tom (gaaacckk!) Cruise or Brad (iccckk!) Pitt!
The Rotten Tomatoes reviews aggregation (it got a 98 per cent "fresh" rating).
Here's an unofficial version of the script.
Here's a Slate column on the Pentagon screening, offering some insight into what's historically accurate about the film, and what's not. An excerpt:
Ultimately, the film evades answering its own moral challenge. It justifies its support of FLN terrorist murder over French torture by rewriting history. According to the film, terror was futile; it didn't work. What finally drove France out, it suggests, was a spontaneous explosion of popular resistance. That scenario, however, is a fantasy. What drove France out was sustained and bloody insurrection.
The CNN review of the Criterion DVD version last fall.
A commentary on the film carried by Common Dreams. An excerpt; I pick it up just after the writer mention's Mathieu's "consequences" line :
The viewer is then treated to a montage of the consequences: ordinary people tortured with electric shock, nearly drowned, hung upside-down -- acts so crude and brutal that in the end they undermined the morale of the French military itself. Is this what the Pentagon wants to convey to its men and women in Iraq or to those who will lead them? That the end justifies the means? If so, they should recall that the use of torture in Algeria became one of the things that destroyed the French case for remaining there and it so disgusted the French public they ultimately acquiesced in giving up their colony.
The name of Jean-Paul Sartre occurs only once in Pontecorvo's film, but he played a major role in changing French public opinion. In his introduction to Algerian newspaper editor Henri Alleg's The Question, Alleg's account of his own torture at the hands of the Paras, Sartre points to the real issue at stake:
"This rebellion is not merely challenging the power of the settlers, but their very being. For most Europeans in Algeria, there are two complementary and inseparable truths: the colonists are backed by divine right, the natives are sub-human. This is a mythical interpretation of reality, since the riches of the one are built on the poverty of the other. In this way exploitation puts the exploiter at the mercy of his victim, and the dependence itself begets racialism. It is a bitter and tragic fact that, for the Europeans in Algeria, being a man means first and foremost superiority to the Moslems. But what if the Moslem finds in his turn that his manhood depends on equality with the settler? It is then that the European begins to feel his very existence diminished and cheapened."