NPR, 2009; Le Monde, 1956

So, having refused to be interviewed by Glenn Greenwald about her defense of NPR's avoidance of the use of the word "torture," NPR ombudsman Alicia C. Shepard did agree to go on an NPR show immediately before him. That way, it could be almost like an actual adult conversation but without, you know, any pesky conversing involved.

Shepard's defense of NPR's practices in her segment here is just mind-boggling -- so much so, in fact, that Kevin Drum assumed Glenn Greenwald was exaggerating when he paraphrased it. He was not. Here are Shepard's actual words, when pressed on why NPR had no problem referring to a journalist in Gambia being tortured:

...these were strictly tactics to torture him, to punish him, versus these in the United States in the way that it's used these are tactics used to get information.

Um, excuse me? It's not torture if it's used to "get information"? As Greenwald points out, even laying aside the glaring falsehood here re. the pristine purity of US motives for the use of torture, this is wrong, wrong, wrong. Torture is torture, regardless of motive. Does Shepard think the Gestapo wasn't torturing French Resistance members when they put them through excruciating pain -- beatings, kickings, whippings, electrical shock, burning, needles, etc., often ending in death -- in an attempt to glean information about their networks of fellow resisters? How about French use of torture during the Battle of Algiers, as part of a systematic effort to locate and destroy the Algerian National Liberation Front in the city? Hey, they were just using some "tactics" to "get information"!

I don't believe Shepard thinks that -- because it's just too absurd to countenance. What she really means, of course, is that it's not torture when we do it. This kind of blind, my-country-right-or-wrong "patriotism" was also present in France during the Algerian War, and it helped lead plenty of people -- including people who actually understood perfectly well what France was up to in Algeria -- to publicly deny that any torture was going on.

In my mind today, I've been putting that kind of logic, the logic that seeks by any means possible to deny wrongdoing by one's own country, next to that of the French historian of early Christianity Henri-Irénée Marrou, writing in Le Monde in 1956, before many people in France were talking about torture. Marrou's op-ed contribution was called "France, ma patrie" ("patrie" is a little tricky to translate -- it means homeland, fatherland, or simply country) and, in the name of his love of France, Marrou denounced the French use of torture in Algeria. Here's a rough translation of some of the piece:

I am neither a professional journalist nor a politician; I testify here as a simple citizen whose conscience torments him, and who notices that he is not the only one to feel this heavy discomfort, this worry, this anguish...

...[E]verywhere in Algeria -- it is denied by no one -- veritable laboratories of torture have been installed, with electric bathtubs and everything that is required, and this is a disgrace for the country of the French Revolution, and of the Dreyfus Affair: I cannot, without shuddering, think about the day when I was charged with representing the government of the Republic at an exposition organized by UNESCO at the Galliera museum, in honor of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. There was a whole display panel devoted to the abolition -- not, oh hypocrisy, the renewal -- of judicial torture.

....Yes, French grandeur is in peril. I speak to all those who like me, a professor, are educators; who, like me, have children and grandchildren: we must be able to speak to them without shame about Oradour [site of a WWII massacre] and about the Nuremberg trials. We must be able to reread in front of them the beautiful pages of our classics about love of country, about our France, 'patron and witness (and often martyr) for freedom in the world.' Yes, before we become further engaged in the infernal cycle of terrorism and reprisals, each one of us must hear from the deepest, most profound part of his heart the cry of our fathers: 'La patrie is in danger!'

And, by the way, when readers wrote in to protest publication of Marrou's piece, Le Monde editor-in-chief Hubert Beuve-Méry (whose son was actually fighting for the French in Algeria at that moment, and who was no great fan of the Algerian independence fighters) responded that patriotism "does not consist of imitating or adopting, even as reprisals, the practices that we condemn on the part of the adversary. And no more does it consist of carefully dissimulating that which, chez nous, might be blameworthy."

I think they say it pretty well. The America that I want to live in doesn't use torture. And that means it doesn't use torture, not "it calls torture by some other name."

Pictures and Words

At his press conference on Tuesday, President Obama spoke movingly about the "Neda video" of an Iranian young woman dying -- "It's heartbreaking. It's heartbreaking. And I think that anybody who sees it knows that there's something fundamentally unjust about that." He went on to pay homage to "international norms of freedom of speech, freedom of expression." The indomitable Helen Thomas then broke in to ask him how that could possibly be reconciled with his decision in mid-May to suppress photographs of American military personnel torturing or abusing detainees. (She got cut off, but that was obviously where she was headed.)

It was a great question, even though Obama didn't answer it and the press corps laughed. The "Neda video" has brought home for a lot of people the immense power of images to shape public debate, especially where violence is concerned. When it comes to forms of state violence like killing protesters or torturing detainees, suppressing images is suppressing vital information, information that makes concrete for the public what is actually involved in practices that can otherwise sound clinical and basically harmless. (Here at least, Alicia C. Shepard, NPR's champion of vivid writing and of the avoidance of the word "torture," we can agree: "Show, Don't Tell.") Glenn Greenwald and Alice Ristroph both have posted thoughtful pieces about this.

At the same time, I think it's important to be clear about the limits of what images can do in shaping public debate. As Philip Gourevitch wrote in the NYT last month,

Photographs cannot show us a chain of command, or Washington decision making. Photographs cannot tell stories. They can only provide evidence of stories, and evidence is mute; it demands investigation and interpretation.

I don't agree with Gourevitch's conclusion that therefore Obama made the right decision in opposing the release of the photos. But I do think that he's getting at something very important here. Images of atrocity, all by themselves, can be exceedingly ambiguous. This is true in two different ways. First, if they just show victims' bodies, it can be impossible to even figure out, based solely on the images, who the perpetrator was or what, in political terms, the horrifying pictures can tell us. The images themselves don't tell a whole story -- though they certainly do provide crucial and moving evidence for stories we're already telling or trying to tell. (The "Neda video" essentially fits in this category -- the video is indeed heartbreaking, but in the context of many other sources helping us understand what forces -- in the moment, and in the bigger picture of what's going in in Iran -- are responsible for Neda's death here.)

Second, when images do show torture or execution actually happening, not just victims' bodies afterwards, they encourage us to feel enraged at the people doing it -- but those people are invariably low-level operatives, not policy-makers. And so (as essentially occurred in the case of the Abu Ghraib photographs, for example) those powerful decision-makers who are actually responsible for the system of abuse trot off into the sunset while a handful of soldiers or prison guards get labeled "sadistic" or "bad apples" and get thrown in prison. It's just never going to be photos that implicate the people at the highest levels -- that requires different kinds of sources, much less sensational but nevertheless enormously important. There's a reason tireless French anti-torture campaigner Pierre Vidal-Naquet described the entire anti-torture movement during France's Algerian War as boiling down to "a passionate quest for documents."

This isn't to say images aren't exceedingly valuable. They are. As I've said before, cell phone cameras -- and the existence of the Abu Ghraib photographs in particular -- are one huge reason for the differences between the American conversation about torture for the past several years and the French conversation (or, more often, non-conversation) about torture during the Algerian War. I believe that Obama ought to release the photographs. But ultimately photos can only be worth a thousand words when they're framed by lots and lots and lots of...words.

What was the Algerian War/Why should you care

So here are the basics, quick and dirty. (Okay, one out of two ain't bad. Sorry. I am a wordy person, what can I say?)


From 1954-1962, Algerian fighters under the banner of the Front National de Libération* (FLN) waged a war of independence against France, which had held Algeria as a colony since 1830. Algeria was unusual in France's colonial empire in that it was a "settler" colony: by 1954 about a million Europeans -- of French, Spanish, and Italian origin -- lived in Algerian territory along with about eight million Muslim Algerians. The war (which was not officially acknowledged as such by France at the time -- just referred to as "operations" or "events") ultimately resulted in the decolonization of Algeria, and the mass exodus of the entire European population. Along the way perhaps half a million people died, most of them Muslim Algerians. (This figure is extremely contested, but I'm not going to deal with that whole debate here. It's also worth knowing that Muslim Algerian civilians suffered terribly in ways that cannot be expressed through casualty figures -- for example, about 2 million of them were uprooted and displaced to "regroupment camps.")



The French military tortured systematically from the beginning to the end of the war, most spectacularly during the "Battle of Algiers" in 1957. They used all the classic methods: electricity, simulated drowning, beatings, sexual torture and rape. (The French also committed other sorts of war crimes/atrocities -- summary execution, unlimited detention without charges, etc. -- which I'll write about another time.) The FLN's use of terrorism -- in particular their targeting of European civilians at popular clubs, bars, and so on in urban bombing campaigns -- served as the rationale for this "exhaustive interrogation" of "suspects."

Now, aside from the bare fact of being Muslim, the FLN did not have a great deal in common with twenty-first century Islamist terrorists: for one thing, its members were more motivated by nationalism than by religious ideology (though that did play some role); for another, relying only in part on "terror," they were waging a full-scale war of national liberation against a colonizing power. The Algerian War was a war of independence, a war of decolonization. In that sense, it cannot and should not be understood as analogous to, or a direct precursor to, the United States' "war on terror." I want to be very clear about this. Although I think that learning about what happened in Algeria from 1954-1962 and beyond is enormously interesting, I'm not suggesting that some sort of "key" to America's current experiences lies there. (If you are into this for the sake of the history, probably the best short account that's been translated into English is Benjamin Stora's Algeria, 1830-2000. The bonus there, too, is the book also includes a good succinct history of post-independence Algeria. Alistair Horne's Savage War of Peace , which George Bush once horrifyingly bragged he was reading in search of inspiration for counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq, is a classic and a joy to read, if now a bit dated. A Diplomatic Revolution by Matthew Connelly is fabulous, too, from a broader diplo-history perspective.)

As an American today, what I find really significant about the use of torture in the Algerian War is what it did to France, which underwent a profound crisis of democracy as it attempted to hold on to Algeria. Now, obviously, not all of the ways that France got ripped apart over the Algerian War can be blamed on torture -- as I said, it was a war of decolonization, and the loss of Algeria, which had been previously understood by most French people to be an integral part of France, was traumatic in all kinds of ways. The collapse of France's Fourth Republic in 1958, in the wake of what was essentially a military coup in Algiers, along with the subsequent attempted coups and civil violence that plagued the Fifth Republic until the conclusion of the war, had all kinds of complicated causes. But what torture did do was poison the public sphere: to conceal the fact that the military was torturing, French governments turned to censorship, seizure of publications deemed deleterious to the honor and reputation of the Army, paralyzing control over the movements of journalists, and prosecution of those who nevertheless continued to publish evidence that torture was going on. Torture fueled high-level government deception; it robbed France of any moral high ground from which to denounce FLN terrorism; it put in an impossible, shaming, corrupting position the roughly two million men who served in France's conscript Army in Algeria. (Most of them had nothing directly to do with torture, which tended to be the job of elite units.) And, of course, inevitably, over time it seeped back into metropolitan France, so that by the end of the war torture was being employed by the Paris police.

The reason all the government censorship was necessary was that a small but incredibly passionate, intellectually high-powered anti-torture movement developed in France from late 1956. By any concrete measure, it failed: France continued to torture straight through to the miserable end of the war, and no one was prosecuted then or later specifically for having tortured (or ordered torture). But in another sense, its triumphs were enormous: people like Pierre Vidal-Naquet (read the Guardian's obit of him here), carrying on despite constant government harassment, prosecution, journal seizures -- and, eventually, despite death threats and bombings from hard-line supporters of France's presence in Algeria -- told the truth about what France was doing. Relentlessly. They laid the groundwork for France's eventual reckoning with its past, which is still going on today. (Vidal-Naquet's investigations of government involvement in torture, carried out under huge constraints during the war, remain indispensable for historians of the period.)

The French anti-torture activists also laid an invaluable groundwork for other people living in Western democracies, people like us, to draw on when we try to articulate what, exactly, is so absolutely corrosive and wrong about torture, and why the use of it signals a mortal threat to all that is good and right and admirable in our political system. (Vidal-Naquet got this better than anyone -- check out his 1963 book titled Torture: Cancer of Democracy.) What is especially significant, for our purposes: they did this while acknowledging that France was fighting an opponent that used terrorism against civilians. (Some of them did a much, much better job of this than others -- something that I think affords lots of lessons and that I'd like to continue blogging about in future posts.)

They also did it from a variety of perspectives: Catholics were active in the anti-torture campaign (and especially good at articulating the "infernal dialectic" between torture and terror, and the reason that one was morally obligated to fight against them both), and so were secular humanist existentialists; anti-colonial activists but also people who would have preferred that Algeria remain part of France both participated.

So -- so what? Why does this stuff matter? After all, it's not as if we're short on contemporary commentators who are very, very good at explaining what is wrong with torture -- why dig back to a bunch of French people doing a similar thing in radically different circumstances? Especially since now the major issue on the table is prosecution, and we can see that the French hardly provide any positive insight there: they failed to prosecute and indeed passed general amnesties (thus more recently, when a former Algerian War torturer came out with a proudly confessional memoir, French courts were able to sentence him only for "making excuses for war crimes," not for having comitted them in the first place).

I think it matters for a couple of reasons. Second one I'll save for a subsequent post because this is getting unconscionably long. The first one is that I think that historical comparison can function as illuminating intellectual practice. I posted several days ago about a friend asking me whether the French Right had made "this-stuff-doesn't-really-hurt" arguments to justify torture. Well, it's a long answer (one that begins with pointing out that the correct subject for the sentence is really not "the French Right" but a far more complicated entity), but it basically boils down to "no." Thinking through why that difference exists is helpful for recognizing certain features of the current American debate. Like, wow, cell phone cameras really changed the world. Because the main reason the French torture-defenders didn't argue that stuff like simulated drowning was no big deal was because they didn't have to: they didn't have to admit simulated drowning was happening AT ALL. In the absence of certain forms of highly-circulated, red-handed visual evidence, like the Abu Ghraib photos in Bush-era America, "deny, deny, deny" (even if massive, overwhelming proof actually does exist) remains a plausible public-relations strategy. Even more plausible if any time a newspaper prints the word "torture," the government seizes it! So although it's frustrating as all hell to hear waterboarding described over and over (and over and over) as a form of "enhanced interrogation" or whatever, thinking about the French case made me realize that the fact that this is happening is actually a sign that the free press in America, thanks in large part to the web, is still functioning. Denial that these things happened at all, which will always be the first line of defense, is no longer possible. And that is encouraging, despite everyting.

I'll end for the moment on that quasi-hopeful note.

* Oh fun, I just spent an hour awkwardly figuring out how to do accents in blogger without cutting& pasting. I guess html is going to be a kind of learn-as-you-go project for me. This is really good -- my students last semester were so derisive of the baby-level html skills I demonstrated in formatting the class's Blackboard site that I started to feel like, compared to them, there is basically no difference between me and certain older family members who still call the internet "the AOL."

the French case

As I've read blogosphere debates about America's "war on terror" and use of torture over the last couple of years, I've been struck by how infrequently French Algeria comes up. Take Andrew Sullivan, one of the most passionate anti-torture voices out there and a blogger that I like a lot. Sullivan mentions the French use of torture in Algeria in passing occasionally, and a couple of times (here and here) he links to substantive discussions of some historical parallels. But he refers more often to the Khmer Rouge and the Nazis.



If you're just looking for horrific historical examples of the use of torture, you certainly need go no further. But what's interesting about France during the Algerian War, and why I've been slightly surprised that it hasn't gotten more play, is that it provides us with an example of what happens in a liberal Western democracy when it decides to use torture against an opponent that uses terror. (Hint: it isn't pretty.) To think that's interesting and worth examining, you don't need to believe that the Algerian War of 1954-1962 was highly analogous to today's so-called War on Terror (it wasn't) or that the Algerian independence fighters resembled today's Al Qaeda ideologically (they didn't).



Historical comparisons are hazardous by their very nature. But historical knowledge is empowering and useful. And for Americans today, historical knowledge of what happened in French civil society and politics when France used torture in Algeria would be especially useful. Future posts will lay out some of the basics.

Why blog?

The other day, my friend Seth emailed me. He was involved in an ongoing debate with some friends about America's use of torture, and the justifications that have been and continue to be offered for it. He had made the argument that the American right today is doing something historically unprecedented when they defend practices like waterboarding with the claim that they aren't really torture: according to Seth, other regimes and their supporters have denied that they tortured at all, sure, but they haven't engaged in this kind of hair-splitting about whether x,y,z practices "count" as "real" torture. The phenomenon of a right-wing radio host getting himself waterboarded to prove it's "no big deal" is uniquely American, Seth said; it's really unimaginable that an analogous thing would have happened in, say, Latin America during the Dirty Wars. Seth's friends were dubious that this kind of logic was really a new phenomenon in the long, ugly history of torture regimes, and so he wanted to know if my knowledge of French discourses about the torture used in the Algerian War supported his point.

I'll get into what, exactly, I wrote to him in another post. (The whole banister/bannister incident has set me back few hours here.) What was most striking to me about our whole exchange, which turned out to be rather extended, was that it was enormously fun for me. A LOT more fun than actually working on the ol' dissertation. I got to thinking that the reason I began working on debates about torture and terrorism in 1950s-60s France in the first place is because of their remarkable resonance with and relevance to contemporary American debates about the same things. But now, years into my project, I pretty much never get the chance to actually write about those intersections and parallels -- I do strictly academic, historical work without a lot of room for that kind of reflection.

This blog is intended as an experiment in remedying that situation, and trying to inject some of the excitement that I felt writing to Seth back into my day-to-day life as a historian. Partly. I'm also planning posts on my various other obsessions (some of them much cheerier than torture & terror, I promise). We'll see how it goes.