PARIS: The kind of torture inflicted upon Iraqi prisoners by the US army followed methods France used during the Algerian war of independence in the late 1950s, several French historians and journalists say.

Both the US and the French armies had obviously studied Muslim traditions in order to devise torture methods aimed particularly at Muslims, they say. "It is obvious that the US army has been applying in Iraq knowledge the French army picked up in Algeria in the late 1950s," historian Claire Mauss-Copeau told IPS.

Mauss-Copeau, professor of Maghreb history at the University of Sorbonne in Paris, referred particularly to the pictures taken in the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib showing US soldiers intimidating naked Iraqi men with dogs, or inflicting sexual harassment.

"Such humiliations are terrible for a Muslim," she said. "In Muslim tradition, dogs are seen as impure animals. And nudism, especially of men before women, is the worst form of humiliation."

Muslim scholars too speak of the shame around nakedness. "To be exposed naked before other men is itself a big humiliation for a Muslim," one scholar said. To be photographed naked before women is a shame words cannot express, he added.

Journalists who covered the Algerian war have found similarities between French military doctrines and the US army conduct in Iraq. "As I saw the photographs taken by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib which shocked the world a few weeks ago, I immediately knew that I had seen comparable documents in Algeria in the 1950s," journalist Jacques Duquesne told IPS.

Duquesne, senior editor with the French weekly L'Express, covered the Algerian war of independence (1954-1962) fought between the French army and the National Liberation Front (FLN), the Algerian independence guerrilla movement.

The French army resorted to extensive torture and summary executions in a fruitless effort to break the freedom movement. France accepted Algerian independence in 1962 under Gen Charles de Gaulle. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service.