A great film of an ongoing saga

Rating: 10/10 (23 June 2009)

I saw the Battle of Algiers (along with all of the equally excellent bonus documentary features) after having seen Jean-Pierre Melville's "Army of Shadows" and realized that I was watching a sequel of sorts, as the top operatives had learned their interrogation and torture techniques (on the receiving end) from the Nazis as members of the French resistance. They then went on to develop them in Indochina (see "The 317th Platoon"); and after Algiers was "lost" a few of the veterans provided "the inspiration, the training, and some of the intelligence that enabled Latin American dictators to torture and kill thousands of their own citizens" as documented in the film "Death Squadrons: The French School." They also trained the U.S. operatives in such techniques as assassinations, extraordinary rendition, and water boarding used in Guantanimo and Abu Ghraib, providing the basic curriculum for the infamous School of the Americas where so much of the U.S. Empire's genocidal activities were/are engineered.