Ensure you get the full lesson, and not just selective aspects.

The issue of torture at that time caused huge fissures in the French Army. One general and several other senior officers resigned to protest methods they considered contrary to military ethics, disgraceful to the Army’s image, and, from the operational perspective, counterproductive because they drove Algerians to the FLN. The last point highlights the danger of this sort of "justification" for torture. In most cases, the tactical value of any info gained by torture - which has a high probability of being unreliable in the first place - is outweighed by the negative impact upon the strategic campaign and the resultant support it engenders for the bad guys.

A brief quote from Bernard Fall in an interview in '63: One of the by-products of revolutionary war - to come back to the question the gentleman asked me about the French officers - is that after awhile not only the front lines get fuzzy (because there aren't any front lines), but your higher front lines, of what is morally acceptable and what is not, also get fuzzy. This is really the permanent danger to anyone who has to fight that kind of war. This is what led those French colonels to practice the same tactics which they practiced on the Algerians and Vietnamese, on their own government and people in France. This is a real danger factor. An army which has to fight a revolutionary war changes in character--it changes very seriously in character. This has not yet been studied, but it must be clearly recognized and is certainly worth the study.

Effective interrogation supporting counterterrorism is far more complex and difficult than everyday law enforcement interrogation or military PW interrogation in a conventional conflict. But torture does absolutely nothing to facilitate the effective collection of intelligence information in support of the strategic effort. In that context, it is counterproductive. That is the real lesson of Algeria.