Jane Mayer had a
New Yorker piece about the politics behind John
Surnow, co-creator and executive producer of the hit TV series 24.
The trick to selling anything, [Surnow] learned, is to carry yourself with confidence and get the customer to like you within the first five minutes. He’s got it down. “People in the Administration love the series, too,” he said. “It’s a patriotic show. They should love it.”
Yes, they should. It has helped the US public (15 million viewers a week at the height of the
show's popularity) and US soldiers in Iraq accept the "validity" of torture in fighting the so-called "global war on terrorism." Not a war on human beings, mind you, nor a nations, but on a tactic typically used by an opposition who is weaker, either in force of arms, strength of force, military technology, or moral justification for the killing, mayhem and destruction.
... With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.
The show’s appeal, however, lies less in its violence than in its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the “ticking time bomb” plot.
...
Bob Cochran, who created the show with Surnow, admitted, “Most terrorism experts will tell you that the ‘ticking time bomb’ situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week.”
...
For all its fictional liberties, “24” depicts the fight against Islamist extremism much as the Bush Administration has defined it: as an all-consuming struggle for America’s survival that demands the toughest of tactics.
In this manner, the show operates as propaganda supporting the
Bushian world view, and inuring Americans to the pain and suffering of others because such pain and suffering MUST be inflicted in order to save us. Another in an endlessly series of laws spawned to propagate the myth of American
exceptionalism.
Since September 11th, depictions of torture have become much more common on American television.
The desensitization to torture has been going on for seven years now. But with other shows such as
NCIS, and the
CSI's, Americans have been served up a steady diet of dismembered and dissected bodies, skeletons, internal hemorrhaging, blood splatters and pools everywhere.
But in other TV eras, we had vicious Indian savages (50's), a seemingly endless series of Black drug dealers, pimps and snitches (70's - present day) and some very unscrupulous Hispanic drug lords (80's - present). All of these contribute to a narrative of white supremacy (and decency).
Throughout the series, secondary characters raise moral objections to abusive interrogation tactics. Yet the show never engages in a serious dialogue on the subject. Nobody argues that torture doesn’t work, or that it undermines America’s foreign-policy strategy. Instead, the doubters tend to be softhearted dupes.
Only latte-sipping liberals, intellectuals, commies, pinkos, fags,
feminazi's and democrats (traitors all) would ever complain about torture. "Everybody" understands that such squeamish people aren't really Americans; they're probably anti-war and peace demonstrators - how much more
unamerican can you get than that?
Howard Gordon, who is the series’ “show runner,” or lead writer, told me that he concocts many of the torture scenes himself. “Honest to God, I’d call them improvisations in sadism,” he said.
Gordon at least is far more honest than the Bush administration.
This past November [2006], U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind “24.” Finnegan, ... was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country ...
... Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show’s central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers.
When the dean of West Point flies cross country to make a point, I'd say either the dean doesn't have enough useful thins to do, or the man take the
show's "toxic effect" VERY seriously.
Finnegan told the producers that “24,” by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the country’s image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniors—cadets who would soon be commanders in the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. He always tries, he said, to get his students to sort out not just what is legal but what is right. However, it had become increasingly hard to convince some cadets that America had to respect the rule of law and human rights, even when terrorists did not. One reason for the growing resistance, he suggested, was misperceptions spread by “24,” which was exceptionally popular with his students. As he told me, “The kids see it, and say, ‘If torture is wrong, what about “24”?’ ”
Note - the military is more worried about the country's image in this regard than the STATE DEPARTMENT. The military, here, is actually taking an initiative that State should have taken.
NEVER underestimate the propaganda value of TV and movies. Rambo III was dedicated to the
Afghani "freedom fighters", pure political propaganda to help drum up support for US intervention to help the
mujaheedan fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Of course, the
mujaheedan morphed into the Taliban and
al-
Queda. But the CIA was able to get payback on the Soviets for the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. Read Charlie Wilson's war. This is exactly the CIA mindset motivating the extraordinary amount of money and arms provided.
Joe Navarro, one of the F.B.I.’s top experts in questioning techniques, attended the meeting; he told me, “Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected. You don’t want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems.”
...
The notion that physical coercion in interrogations is unreliable, although widespread among military intelligence officers and F.B.I. agents, has been firmly rejected by the Bush Administration.
Although reports of abuses by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, have angered much of the world, the response of Americans has been more tepid. Finnegan attributes the fact that “we are generally more comfortable and more accepting of this,” in part, to the popularity of “24,” which has a weekly audience of fifteen million viewers, and has reached millions more through DVD sales. The third expert at the meeting was Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator in the war in Iraq ...
“In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence,” Lagouranis told me. “I worked with someone who used waterboarding”—an interrogation method involving the repeated near-drowning of a suspect. “I used severe hypothermia, dogs, and sleep deprivation. I saw suspects after soldiers had gone into their homes and broken their bones, or made them sit on a Humvee’s hot exhaust pipes until they got third-degree burns. Nothing happened.” Some people, he said, “gave confessions. But they just told us what we already knew. It never opened up a stream of new information.” If anything, he said, “physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up.”
So, who are we to believe? The Bush administration, or "professional" interrogators?
David Nevins, the former Fox Television network official who, in 2000, bought the pilot on the spot after hearing a pitch from Surnow and Cochran, and who maintains an executive role in “24,” is candid about the show’s core message. “There’s definitely a political attitude of the show, which is that extreme measures are sometimes necessary for the greater good,” he says. “The show doesn’t have much patience for the niceties of civil liberties or due process.
And at the end of the day (at the beginning of the day, and at all points in between), the present day incarnation of the republican party most assuredly has little patience of "the niceties of civil liberties or due process"
Last March, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Virginia, joined Surnow and Howard Gordon for a private dinner at Rush Limbaugh’s Florida home. The gathering inspired Virginia Thomas—who works at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank—to organize a panel discussion on “24.” The symposium, sponsored by the foundation and held in June, was entitled “ ‘24’ and America’s Image in Fighting Terrorism: Fact, Fiction, or Does It Matter?” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who participated in the discussion, praised the show’s depiction of the war on terrorism as “trying to make the best choice with a series of bad options.” He went on, “Frankly, it reflects real life.”
Strange
befellows. Strange bedfellows indeed.
The same day as the Heritage Foundation event, a private luncheon was held in the Wardrobe Room of the White House for Surnow and several others from the show ... Among the attendees were Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff; Tony Snow, the White House spokesman; Mary Cheney, the Vice-President’s daughter; and Lynn Cheney, the Vice-President’s wife, who, Surnow said, is “an extreme ‘24’ fan.” After the meal, Surnow recalled, he and his colleagues spent more than an hour visiting with Rove in his office.
The so-called liberals from Hollywood?
... many prominent conservatives speak of “24” as if it were real. John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped frame the Bush Administration’s “torture memo”—which, in 2002, authorized the abusive treatment of detainees—invokes the show in his book “War by Other Means.” He asks, “What if, as the popular Fox television program ‘24’ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?”
Yes John. Indeed. As an
aficionado of a fictitious TV show, Woo was able to envision the scenario where torture would be necessary, and thus did her tortuously torture the definition of torture so that US interrogators could torture and not have to be mentally tortured about the consequences of inflicting torture, or the niceties of civil liberties or due process.
Get it done NOW, soldier. There's only five minutes before New York City blows!!
Four
Three
Two
One
Not with a bang ... but with a whimper
