The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

most diverse elements.” (Ageron, p. 17) Rather, they were the fully rational actions of military leaders
who had strong (but completely incorrect) prior beliefs fed by French misinformation, and who
believed torture to be effective at ferreting out the truth. The resulting spiral of suspicions, torture and
executions shares important similarities with the events in Salem Village: once the misinformation was
accepted by the judges, the accused (whether witches or traitors) found themselves subjected to a brutal
calculus that weighed confession against something far worse: death, for the accused witches; a process
of dying made indefinitely long for the accused traitors. The end result was the same: torture leading to
torture as the cycle continued and expanded into other Wilayas.
Amirouche implied that Wilaya four, in particular, was ridden with traitors: here the latent
generational cleavage between the FLN leadership and the students who had left Algiers during the
battle to join the FLN. It was feared in particular that the students were planning to take control of the
Wilaya, and offer terms to the French. (ibid.) At an inter-Wilaya meeting called by Amirouche on
December 3 rd , 1958, the head of Wilaya four, Si M'Hamed, was convinced that the plot was far graver
and larger than he had previously believed: upon his return to the bled, he would follow in Amirouche's
footsteps, and would obtain the same results. The purge unleashed ended up liquidating the students as
a group, and then turned its fury on 'deviationists' and other internal enemies. But rather than pruning
and strengthening the FLN, the purges had the opposite effect: desertions to the French increased as it
became ever more dangerous to stay in the Wilayas, and dissension in the ranks was to hand the French
a major victory - the deaths of three of the six Wilaya chiefs. On March 28 th , after his katiba had been
nearly wiped out a week prior by an inexplicably fortunate French column, Amirouche was killed along
with Si Haouès of Wilaya 6, most likely as the result of information passed on to the French by “those
of [Amirouche's] colleagues to whom Amirouche, in particular, had become an embarrassment in his
ruthless cruelty and lust for power.” (Horne, p. 324) Similarly, Si M'Hamed disappeared on an
operation in May – but whatever his fate, he was not captured or killed by the French. Even the deaths
of these commanders did not bring the spiral of denunciations to a close, as the chaos in Wilaya four
was to last until the end of 1959
4.6. Weighing the Costs and Benefits
The Scale of the Torture by the DOP
The capture of Ben M'Hidi and Yacef, the deaths of Kamel, Mourad and Ali la Pointe, the
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