So, if I'm reading this correctly, Joe Warblogger, and the pundits that saturate the Vast Liberal Media, are stating that if someone attacks us, without such nicieties as a formal declaration of war, that torturing them is perfectly acceptable, even if it doesn't do any real good for us -- they deserve it, of course, and if they all get tortured, that's fine.

Given that, I look back at historical examples of such activity, and note that, as of this moment (More correctly, as of the first time we shipped a supposed member of a supposed terrorist group to the Phillipines for a rubber-hose massage) we can no longer possibly say *anything*, not ONE FUCKING WORD, about the treatment of US POWs in Vietnam, since this is now, apparently, Laudable Government Policy on the part of the United States.

Franz Fanon's Wretched of the Earth was, among other things, about the psychological effects of torture both on the victims or on the torturers. The actual hands-on torturers were under military discipline and under orders. They usually did not choose their jobs and suffered symptoms for years.

Similiar stories have been told from Latin America (ca. 1975? --1990?.) The US was seriously implicated in the Latin American case, and based on a conversation with an acquaintance/friend in the US military, I'm not at all sure that we ever really renounced the practice.

The Franch case is more subtle. Massu (?), who authorised the routine use of torture, died recently, still maintaining that he had been right. After all, the French did win the Battle of Algiers, in which torture was used all the time. They just lost the war. I wrote a piece in Salon in late September 2001 saying "Don't torture people", because the long-term effects are so dreadful. But we have to admit that the really damaging long-term effect is that it turns our own army into the Gestapo and not that the Gestapo were particularly inefficient.

Sure I can get you to confess anything in a week, and most of it will be false. But some of it will be true. And if I arrest everyone you named and torture them in turn (which was roughly the French policy in Algiers) then, sooner or later, I will have arrested all the guilty, along with a huge number of innocent people. Most of the innnocent people will have relatives, of course, who may take a dim view of Mum being sodomised with a truncheon so that Mr Bush can be re-elected. But they're Arabs. They don't vote.

The real historical parallel is surely not the French, but the Israelis in the Lebanon, who also used torture as a matter of routine, but with the twist that a lot of their torturing was done for them by native allies. I seem to have missed the bit where American public opinion was outraged by this.

Stop the presses! Pat Buchanan's in favor of it. What a shock!

Andrew: I think you've confused Jacques Massu and Paul Aussaresses. Massu did authorize the use of torture, and did die recently, but a couple of years before he died he publicly stated that he regretted the use of torture in Algeria.

Aussaresses, on the other hand, recently made the news for continuing to maintain that the use of torture in Algeria was justified and right. (Which led to one of the more scathing political cartoons I've seen: a caricature of Aussaresses saying "Of course we had to use torture. Without it, we might have lost Algeria.")

I may well have confused them. Tahnks for putting me right.

If you can stand to read anything more about American subcontracting of torture, I posted a short history of it on my blog. It's not unique to terror cases by any means; it became widespread in Latin American drug cases during the 1970s. In many ways, drug-war operations in Latin America served as a proving ground for the techniques now being used against suspected terrorists.

It predates the '70s. Remember the "tiger cages" and the stories of VC being kicked out of hovering helicopters during the Viet Nam war?