ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses three European cultural narratives of political torture that emerged from the Algerian War of Independence, a bitter and bloody revolutionary conflict with a complex and equivocal cultural afterlife which was frequently invoked in post-9/11 torture discourse both by those who attempted to justify torture and by those who critiqued it. It examines the flexible, multivalent, and ambiguous ways in which the representations and texts of this war have continued to exert a powerful influence on the ways that counterterrorist torture is represented after the 9/11. The narrative of the success of torture in Algeria is also attributable in the large part to Counterrevolutionary War Theory, a model of the warfare developed by the French during the war in Indochina and finalised during the war in Algeria, and which was a critical influence upon later forms of the antiguerrilla and counterinsurgency military doctrine.
