Torture justified but not a pleasure, says French general

A retired French general says the orders he issued to torture and kill prisoners during the Algerian independence war were justifiable acts of duty, a court has heard.

General Paul Aussaresses, 83, says the acts were committed without pleasure.

The former intelligence chief broke an unwritten code of silence with the publication of Special Services: Algeria 1955-57 in which he admitted ordering torture and summary executions.

In a three day trial in Paris, Aussaresses is charged with complicity in justifying war crimes, following a action filed by France's League of Human Rights.

Two other defendants - the book's editors - are charged with justifying war crimes. Each defendant faces up to five years in prison and £30,000 fines.

The retired general told the Paris court, as he has said in the past, that his superiors knew that torture and summary executions were practised under his command.

In his book, Aussaresses said that when he arrived in Algiers in November 1954, French police "made me quickly understand that the best way to make a terrorist talk was to torture him. They spoke softly but without shame about these practices that everyone in Paris knew were used."

President Jacques Chirac has said he was "horrified" by the admissions in the book, in which Aussaresses expresses no remorse. The president stripped Aussaresses of his Legion of Honour award, but also asked historians to dig into recently opened files and get to the truth.

The period surrounding the brutal seven year war, which gave Algeria its independence from France in 1962, has long been shrouded in secrecy. Only in 1999 did France officially call the combat with Algeria a war. It had previously been referred to as "operations to maintain order."

Aussaresses acknowledged there was an unspoken law of silence among secret agents. He implied, as he has done in interviews, that former President Francois Mitterrand, then justice minister, had to have known, too. Mitterrand was French president from 1981-1995.