This video says about itself:

Part(1). The Algerian war, from 1954-1962

The French invaded Algeria in 1830 until 1962.

General Massu, Aussaresses, and then Colonel Bigeard were the military commanders during the 1957 Battle of Algiers. The following year, General Aussaresses confessed in his book “Services spéciaux, Algérie 1955-1957” (2001) to having engaged in torture and illegal executions, on direct orders from General Massu. Aussaresses declared that torture had been directly ordered by Guy Mollet’s government.

And this video is the sequel.

By Alex Lantier in France:

French neo-fascist National Front defends CIA torture

13 December 2014

The defense of CIA torture by Marine Le Pen, the president of France’s neo-fascist National Front and 2017 French presidential hopeful, testifies to the bankruptcy and criminality of Europe’s political establishment.

Asked about the US Senate’s torture report on BFM-TV, she said the United States should stop “giving morality lessons to the whole world,” but defended the CIA: “I am not going to condemn this … On such subjects, it is pretty easy to come on television and say ‘Oh my God, that’s awful.’”

Asked if one could use torture, she replied: “Yes, yes, of course, it has been used historically. I think people who take care of terrorists and therefore of getting information out of them that saves civilian lives are responsible people.”

She proceeded to accept the rationalizations for torture given by defenders of the “war on terror” in the United States: “There can be cases, let me tell you, where tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock, a bomb is going to explode in an hour or two and will thus claim 200 or 300 civilian victims, where it is useful to make the person talk.” Asked if this meant making people talk through torture, she said, “Through the means one has.”

One of her top advisers, Gilbert Collard, echoed her remarks on i-Télé: “It is true that torture can only be an ultimate recourse to save lives. Torture for torture’s sake is horrible, but there is a type of cowardice which consists of saying, ‘Too bad if innocent people die as long as my hands are clean.’ If I have to brutalize someone to save twenty, or ten, or two, or one life, I will do it, admittedly with disgust, but it is a courageous choice.”

Such comments inevitably recall the following defense of torture: “I used torture because it was necessary. When someone has been brought to you who has just hidden twenty bombs that can explode from one minute to the next and he does not want to talk, one must use exceptional means to force him. It is the person who refuses these means who is a criminal, as his hands are covered with the blood of dozens of victims whose death could have been avoided.”

These words appeared in Combat’s 1962 interview with Marine’s father Jean-Marie Le Pen, a lieutenant and intelligence officer of the Foreign Legion’s 1st Parachute Regiment, which had been involved in France’s mass torture of Algerians during Algeria’s 1954-1962 war for independence. He then became FN president from 1972 to 2011, when Marine took over the post.

He later retracted his remarks to Combat and, relying on France’s official refusal to recognize that it used torture in Algeria, sued those who accused him of torture for defamation. He won cases against Libération in 1986 and 1988, and the Canard enchaîné in 1989. He lost a case against Le Monde in 2005, however, when Le Monde produced a Hitler Youth-style knife bearing Le Pen’s name, that he left in 1957 at the house in Algiers where Le Pen’s unit tortured and shot Ahmed Moulay in front of his wife and six children.

The FN’s decision to overlook its anti-American rhetoric and leap to the defense of CIA torture speaks volumes both about the “war on terror” and the FN’s violently reactionary politics, which belie Marine Le Pen’s efforts to distance the FN from her father’s image as a Holocaust-denying torturer.

As revelations emerge of a global network of CIA secret prisons and torture sites spanning dozens of European countries, however, it would be absurd to claim that torture implicates only the FN.

… Bruno Le Roux, the leader of the ruling Socialist Party’s (PS) fraction in the National Assembly, said, “The gégène [electrical generator used to torture Algerians during the war] is in the genes of Le Pen. For her it’s very, very normal,” adding, “Her outburst this morning, saying that sometimes you have to make people talk, it was daddy’s gégène coming back onto the scene.”

If industrial-scale torture is on the scene, this is because of the support given to the CIA and the “war on terror” by all the factions of the European capitalist class—including social democrats and their pseudo-left allies like France’s New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA). The PS government and the NPA have maintained a deafening silence on the CIA torture report.

Since France rejoined NATO’s integrated command in 2009, they aligned themselves on a policy of global, neocolonial war. The PS and the NPA both applauded NATO’s 2011 war in Libya and its proxy war in Syria, based on collaboration with Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias, as revolutions for freedom. They then backed NATO’s ongoing intervention in Ukraine, supporting February’s fascist-led putsch in Kiev.

Just before the Kiev putsch, French President François Hollande made a state visit to Washington, cosigning a joint editorial with President Barack Obama that declared: “We are sovereign and independent nations that make our decisions based on our respective national interests. Yet we have been able to take our alliance to a new level because our interests and values are so closely aligned.”

The US Senate Intelligence Committee’s admission that the CIA used torture on a massive, international scale points to the barbaric character of the “values” shared by US and European imperialism. It also highlights the shift to the right in French bourgeois politics that underlay both collaboration with CIA torture and the FN’s electoral rise over the last decade.

The issue of torture brought an earlier generation face to face with the unresolved legacy of fascist rule in Europe. Torture in Algeria overseen by far-right officers like Le Pen and the 1961 massacre of Algerian protesters by police under Paris police chief Maurice Papon, a former official of the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy regime who played a key role in the Holocaust, shocked masses of people. The name of Guy Mollet, the hated social-democratic premier during the most intensive use of torture in the Algerian war, became a byword for betrayal of principle.

The UK government had redactions made to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interrogation. Britain’s collusion in the torture of individuals who were illegally seized by US authorities is now established: here.

UK torture inquiry could summon Blair and Straw. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, chair of intelligence and security committee, says he will investigate allegations ‘without fear of favour’: here.

Canadian government lies over complicity in CIA torture: here.

Romanian ex-spy chief acknowledges CIA had ‘black prisons’ in country. Ioan Talpes, who led SIE agency, says Bucharest cooperated but ‘took no interest’ in sites as country was trying to join Nato: here.

CIA Director John Brennan’s televised press conference Thursday at the agency’s headquarters, an unprecedented event, marked a new threshold in the collapse of American democracy and the erection of a police state. The very fact that it was left to the head of the spy agency rather than President Obama to issue the government’s rebuttal to this week’s devastating Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture makes clear who is really in control of the American state: here.

A petition on this:

Stop Torture! Accountability: YES – Impunity: NO

Petition initiated by two former UN Assistant Secretaries-General, UN Humanitarian Coordinators for Iraq: Hans von Sponeck and Denis Halliday.

This petition will be delivered to: US Government – International Criminal Court – President of the UN General Assembly – President of the Human Rights Council – European Court of Justice

Articles about the torture report

The CIA’s Torture Program – an overview of information

UN expert calls for prosecution of CIA officers and other US Government officials

US Vice President Dick Cheney: President George W Bush ‘knew everything’ about CIA interrogation

Torture Report Raises Hopes, Offers Ammo for Bush & Co. Prosecutions

Two US law bases for prosecution of the acts described in the Senate Torture Report

the report

On 9 December 2014, the US Senate released its CIA torture report. The investigation confirmed what globally has been known for many years:

The US Central Intelligence Agency and US-outsourced national authorities in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere have been involved in an extensive range of torture applications.

Compelling evidence has become available, especially since 2001, the beginning of the Afghanistan war, through investigations by the European Parliament and national judicial authorities, as well as two major reports presented by Swiss Senator Dick Marty in 2006 and 2007 to the Council of Europe, on secret CIA detention centres in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere.

The US Senate report makes it clear that cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment of captives by the CIA and its collaborators have been carried out on a continuous basis. Such treatment can not be justified in any manner, even if the US Government reservations with which it signed the UN torture convention in 1994 were to be taken into account.

CIA personnel and others wilfully participated in following executive orders and directives thereby violating the UN torture convention and the Geneva Convention III. In this way they have committed serious crimes for which they must be held accountable.

The UN Special Representative on Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights, Ben Emmerson QC has reminded us that “torture is a crime of universal jurisdiction”.

The U.N. high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Raad al-Hussein, said it is “crystal clear” under international law that the United States, which ratified the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994, now has an obligation to ensure accountability. He further added: “If they order, enable or commit torture, recognized as a serious international crime, they cannot simply be granted impunity because of political expediency”.

US President Obama must be aware that not holding the perpetrators accountable is a victory for impunity and will have far-reaching implications for global security.

We, signatories from all parts of the world, therefore urge the US Government and its Attorney General, to start a judicial process with a sense of urgency in compliance with principles of equality before the law. If they fail to do so, other international bodies, such as the International Criminal Court, will have the obligation under international law to assure that justice is done.