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

the revolution itself, hidden among their most valuable asset: their own men. If it can be shown that
French success in dismantling the FLN in Algiers was not primarily the result of torture, and that the
use of torture by necessity caused the French to lose strategically what they had won tactically, then we
will have a strong case to make that torture – while it may work in individual circumstances – simply
does not work as a system of gathering information. In addition, the comparison provided by the use of
torture by the FLN against itself allows us further evidence of torture's unsuitability for information
gathering. The purge in the bled was no Stalinist attempt by the more authoritarian sections of the FLN
to centralize power and do away with political opponents: while the torture began in Amirouche's
Wilayah 3 (highly centralized and authoritarian), they quickly spread to the far more democratically
organized Wilayah 4 under Si M'hammed. Moreover, there were traitors operating against the
revolution – unlike Salem, this was no imaginary threat. And yet torture in the bled not only proved
incapable of locating the source of the treason, it did more to help the French than the torture in the
Casbah.
The chapter proceeds as follows. The next section outlines the scope of the investigation and
outlines the analysis of torture that I use. The third section covers the history of the Algerian liberation
movement, beginning in 1945 with the Sétif uprising, and extending to the Battle of Algiers itself (1957
– 1958). With the basic historical data established, the fourth section examines the role played by
torture in the break up of Yacef's terror organization, and argues that torture per se was less responsible
for Massu's successes than the informants who willingly (or unwillingly) revealed the names and
positions of FLN activists. The fifth section then turns to the effects of the French success in
infiltrating and perverting the FLN, by examining how the search for traitors unleashed another
deceptive cycle. Section six considers the effects of torture on balance, weighing the ambiguous
successes against the certain failures, as well as the weakening of French domestic support, and the
collapse of the Fourth Republic itself. The final section concludes by considering these cases in light
of the theory.
4.2. Analyzing Torture
Before beginning this project, I should first describe the scope of the investigation. We are not
concerned in this chapter with the success of the French colonial project – after all, the French were
forced to leave Algeria despite the crushing of the FLN's organization in Algiers. But to denounce
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