We knew damn well if he went to Canada, he wouldn't be tortured. He'd be held and he'd be investigated. We also knew damn well if he went to Syria, he'd be tortured. And it's beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured,"---Sen. Patrick Leahy quoted at Crooks and Liars.
For 10 and ½ months, Canadian citizen Maher Arar was tortured in my name. I am an American, and in order to protect me, the Bush administration felt it necessary to question this man, not under the laws of his country, nor of mine, but under those of Syria-- a nation that engages in torture. Do Americans still care? If we're to get his story through our American-Idol-soaked popular consciousness, then we need an image to make it real. America needs its Gillo Pontecorvo.
The cable is a black electrical cable, about two inches thick. They hit me with it everywhere on my body. They mostly aimed for my palms, but sometimes missed and hit my wrists. They were sore and red for three weeks. They also struck me on my hips, and lower back. Interrogators constantly threatened me with the metal chair, tire and electric shocks.----Maher Arar quoted at CBC.
Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo may be one of the most interesting film-makers of the 20th century. He started his career in the 1950s with documentaries; what marks his later films is how much they resemble documentaries in their loving detail and realism. There is no finer expression of this than in his 1966 movie, The Battle of Algiers, which told the horrifying story of the urban guerilla Algerian National Liberation Front and the counterinsurgency tactics of the French army in Algiers, during the wider War for Algerian Independence.
The Battle of Algiers feels like a documentary in its use of realistic settings. Pontecorvo used almost no professional actors, just ordinary Algerians whom he found in the market and on the street. The film is a fairly even-handed portrayal of both sides. We see the Algerians bombed in their homes by policemen. We see them strike back, launching a deadly series of bombings against French colonials. Agonizingly, Pontecorvo shows us the victims, waiting innocently in a café, a dairy bar, in the town. His sympathies may be with the anti-colonial forces, but he never lets them off the hook. We see the children, the couples, everyone who is about to die. We look them in the eye, and then the bombs go off.
Nothing is spared; as I said, the film feels like a documentary in its distance and dispassion. Perhaps that’s why it’s so horrifying. We can understand why the French locals cheer the arrival of coolly professional paratroopers. We can even understand why those same men resort to torture in order to stop the violence, to break up the cells. Pontecorvo doesn't spare us here, either. We see water torture and an agonizing flash of the use of a blow torch on a prisoner. Perhaps worse than the torture itself is the look on the prisoner’s face. The ordinary Algerian playing the role has a face full of pain and humiliation; we know he is broken under torture, even as the soldiers cease their efforts and treat him like the human being he really is.
How good is this movie in portraying the tensions of "insurgency"? Pretty good, or at least that’s what the Pentagon thought. In 2003, the US Directorate for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict at The Pentagon offered a special screening of the movie. The flyer for the event read:
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. --------–from Wikipedia
The Pentagon saw the film as a powerful illustration of the way that harsh measures—torture, kidnaping, and all the trappings of a "dirty war" –eventually backfired on the French Paratroopers. Able to defuse the terrorist cells and prevent more bombings, they lost in the long run. Hmm. Someone in the Pentagon is paying attention.
But perhaps they missed one of the greater points about the film. It is not just a military story. It is about the soul of a nation.
Col. Mathieu: We aren't madmen or sadists, gentlemen. Those who call us Fascists today, forget the contribution that many of us made to the Resistance. Those who call us Nazis, don't know that among us there are survivors of Dachau and Buchenwald. We are soldiers and our only duty is to win....Should we remain in Algeria? If you answer "yes," then you must accept all the necessary consequences.—dialogue, The Battle of Algiers
As Col Mathieu points out to reporters; if the French nation wants him to win, should it shrink at any method? Mathieu is as cold and professional as his eyeless sunglasses, but there is a certain logic to what he says. By exposing the methods of colonialism, Pontecorvo leads us to question the entire colonial venture.
This portrayal was only the latest in a slow series of revelations through the thoroughly dirty war in Algeria. In the late 1950s, returning soldiers whispered about the terrible things they had seen—and done. Smuggled accounts gave more detail; French journalist Henri Alleg, arrested and tortured by the paratroopers in 1957, published his account:
"Lo_ fixed a rubber tube to the metal tap which shone just above my face. He wrapped my head in a rag, while De_ said to him: 'put a wedge in his mouth'. With the rag already over my face, Lo_ held my nose. . . And he turned on the tap. The rag was soaked rapidly. Water flowed everywhere: in my mouth, in my nose, all over my face. . . But I couldn't hold on for more than a few moments. I had the impression of drowning, and a terrible agony, that of death itself, took possession of me. . . In the gloom I saw . . . the captain who . . . was hitting my stomach with his fist to make me throw up the water I had swallowed."---Alleg extracted at The Medical Foundation for the Victims of Torture
In 1960, even the staid Le Monde shocked the nation by publishing excerpts from a Red Cross report about the torture and murder of prisoners in Algeria. The word was out. In retrospect, there seems little doubt that the use of torture dealt a fatal blow to French hopes of maintaining control in Algeria.. It also dealt a blow to what I would call the French political psyche. In a land where the torture and abuse of the Nazi occupation was still fresh in memory, the revelations of such abuse were especially shocking. Much as American culture has been haunted by Vietnam, French films like Avoir vingt ans dans l'Aurès (1971) and R.A.S. (1972), and smaller films like L'Honneur d'un capitaine (1982) and Cher Frangin (1989) re-hashed the themes of abuse and failure again and again.
French military authorities listed their losses at nearly 18,000 dead (6,000 from non-combat-related causes) and 65,000 wounded. European descended civilian casualties exceeded 10,000 (including 3,000 dead) in 42,000 recorded terrorist incidents. According to French figures, security forces killed 141,000 rebel combatants, and more than 12,000 Algerians died in internal FLN purges during the war. An additional 5,000 died in the "café wars" in France between the FLN and rival Algerian groups. ----Wikipedia
But of all the films and novels regarding the Algerian war that I have seen (and I’m hardly an expert, just interested), none sticks with me like Pontecorvo’s. Perhaps it took an outsider to tell the tale with such compassion, both for the revolutionaries and for the French soldiers, struggling to do their jobs in an impossible situation. The film was itself banned in France for many years;maybe it did its job too well.
So, I wonder, as I cheer Leahy’s questioning of Gonzales: who will be our Pontecorvo? I do not think it is enough to debate the issue of torture in Senate chambers, on blogs, and even in newspapers. Sometimes it seems as if nothing is real for Westerners until we see it, hear it, feel it in our pop culture. Do we dare confront torture in this fashion? Who will tell Arar’s story?
They used the cable on the second and third day, and after that mostly beat me with their hands, hitting me in the stomach and on the back of my neck, and slapping me on the face. Where they hit me with the cables, my skin turned blue for two or three weeks, but there was no bleeding. At the end of the day they told me tomorrow would be worse. So I could not sleep
.--Maher Arar on his torture
When I returned to the U.S. from living in Canada for many years, I was stunned at the amount of violence accepted in American culture. I was born here, but I’d gotten used to a different way of doing things. No wonder American Christians flocked to see The Passion of the Christ For a previous generation, raised with different sensibilities, it was enough to read the Passion or attend the Stations of the Cross, or ponder the classic paintings of martyrs that I've scattered in this diary. Those images of torture, for a less graphic generation, evoked real horror. No more. Today, it takes the explicit gore of Mel Gibson to shock us out of our complacency, to really see the pain and imagine its effects.
I don’t think Mel is going to tell Maher Arar’s story anytime soon (nor would I want him to.) I was intrigued by the hints of tackling this problem in the Wachowski Brothers' V for Vendetta; I’m told there are powerful anti-torture statements in the new Children of Men. Can we only tell the story in science fiction? How long will it be before we confront our own Battle of Algiers How will we as a nation come back from the brink?
Canadians have been our closest allies – longest unguarded frontier in the world. They're justifiably upset. They're wondering what's happened to us. They're wondering what's happened to us. Now you know and I know, we're a country with a great, great tradition of protecting people's individual liberties and rights...Let us not, let us not create more terrorism around the world by telling the world that we cannot keep up to our basic standards and beliefs.—Patrick Leahy to AG Gonzales, transcript at the Toronto Star
A film, a television program, a novel—these are not recompense. Senator Leahy is right: we need answers. But after the answers, we need to start telling the story. Films don't investigate, but they force us to confront, to make sense, to put together a narrative from the brutal facts. They are ways to begin a conversation, to burn in our hearts and minds the imperatives of just judicial inquiry over horrific torture. To reach beyond our Fox-hardened skins and feel the horror of what has happened.
And maybe, just maybe, to regain our dignity.
Copyright Notices Screen capture from The Battle of Algiers used for critical illustration under fair use.
The Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus by Nicolas Poussin in the public domain
The Torture of Prometheus by Jean-Louis-Cesar Lair in the public domain.
The Torture of St. George by Michiel Van Coxcie in the public domain.
Scourging of Christ by Albrecht Durer in the public domain.
St. Sebastian by Mattia Preti in the public domain.
Cross-posted with slightly different editing at Progressive Historians, Never in our Namesand The Next Agenda.