Aussaresses provoked controversy in 2000 when, in an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, he admitted and defended the use of torture during the Algerian war.
The Jedburghs worked clandestinely behind enemy lines to harness the local resistance and coordinate their activities with the wishes of the Allied Commanders.
He restarted his demi-brigade's intelligence unit, which had been disbanded during peacetime but was deemed necessary by the French Army, which wanted to quell the insurgency of the Algerian rebels.
The members of the FLN had forced many of the men, women and children of the countryside to march in front of them, without weapons, as human shields.
François Mitterrand, the Minister for Justice, had, indeed, an emissary with Massu in judge Jean Bérard, who covered for us and who had complete knowledge of what went on in the night.
He also defended its use by saying that the legal system was meant to deal with a peacetime France, not a counter insurgency war that the French army was faced with in Algeria.
I, who judge no one … often ask, considering what happens in a city today — with those blind attacks which decimate the innocent — why someone does not understand within a few weeks that the high authorities must utilize all means in order to put an end to the terror?...I am a patriot.
I do not seek to justify my actions but simply try to explain that from the moment when a nation demands of its army to fight an enemy that terrorizes the population and forces it into submission, it is impossible for the army not to resort to extreme means....In the interest of my country I had clandestinely carried out operations unacceptable to the ordinary moral standards, had often circumvented the law: stolen, assassinated, vandalized, and terrorized.
I had learned how to pick locks, kill without leaving traces, lie, be indifferent to my suffering and to that of others, had forgotten and made others forget.
[6]In an interview to Marie-Monique Robin, Aussaresses described the methods used, including the creation of death squads (escadrons de la mort), the term being created at this time.
[8] The Ligue des droits de l'homme (LDH, Human Rights League) filed a complaint against him for "apology of war crimes," as Paul Aussaresses justified the use of torture, claiming it had saved lives following the Necessity Defense [AKA: Choice of Evils] and/or the Self-Defense (although he did not explicitly use this expression).
Unlike many of his fellow officers, he did not choose to join the OAS militant group to continue the fight in Algeria after the French military began to withdraw their forces.
In 1961 he was appointed as a military attaché of the French diplomatic mission in the USA, along with ten veterans of the Algerian War formerly under his charge.
[12] U.S. Army Colonel Carl Bernard later recalled that "starting with that book [Modern Warfare] Project Phoenix was conceived".
[15] According to General Manuel Contreras, former head of the Chilean DINA, Chilean officers trained in Brazil under Aussaresses' orders and advised the South American juntas on counter-insurrection warfare and the use of torture that was widely used against leftist opponents to the military regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
[17] An inmate in the asylum for 'noble executioners' in the Jens Bjørneboe novel Powderhouse shares the same biography as Aussaresses; he is described as having served in Algiers and later teaching his methods to South American death squads.