Jerome, I can't find the articles now and in any case they'd be in the paid archives, but I remember reading a long while back in Le Monde that there were numerous reports that the French used the Algerians against the GIA members who conducted the bombing campaign in Paris in the nineties.  There were also reports by ex Algerian military types that the French worked closely  helping the Algerian services in the Algerian counter-insurgency campaign against the FIS and GIA back then.  There were also allegations of torture by Caledonian militants back in the day.  There is nothing specifically French about it. Every major counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency operation seems to open the door to torture, whether the Brits against the IRA, the Spanish against ETA, the Germans against the RAF, the US and its Latin American allies against communist insurgents etc.  The difference between counter-insurgency operations and the fight against tiny groups of terrorists is that the numbers affected are much larger and so much more tends to leak out.