Regime Change

            Flipping around the TV channels the other day I encountered scenes of protestors marching in the street under the barrels of army tanks, demanding independence and dignity and freedom. Shots were fired into the crowd and bodies fell.  Bombs were set off. For a time chaos reigned.

            The scenes were not of action in 2011from Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, Tunisia, Yemen or Jordan. They were from Algiers in 1960 as the Algerians struggled to overthrow French Colonialism. The scenes were from a prize-winning film made by Gillo Pontecorvo in 1966 called The Battle of Algiers.  It is a semi-documentary film depicting events from 1954 to 1962.

            The battle over eight years to keep Algeria part of France was largely waged by French paratroopers who told inquiring reporters that employing torture was not part of their orders, that they only used various “investigative techniques.”  It was very eerie watching scenes showing resistance fighters having their heads held under water, being hog-tied in chairs and suspended from ceilings and burned with blow torches as part of “investigations” seeking information. Despite depicting events of the mid 1950s-early 1960s the scenes looked like they could have come from Abu Gahrib or foreign CIA prisons in the recent past.

Former U. S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a proponent of aggressive interrogation of terrorist suspects has just written a book justifying his actions and blaming others in the Bush Administration for failures. It is said that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Rumsfeld, among others, must have been absent on the day that lessons about torturing suspects were taught.

And as I post this entry comes word that protestors seeking regime change have taken to the streets of Algiers.