Must-See Torture T.V.

I’ve never seen the T.V. program “24.” I’ve never had a desire to. And I certainly don’t wish to start now and, assuming I had any wish to help anything whatsoever to do with Rupert Murdoch (and by the way, I never heard from Bob Casey or Patrick Murphy regarding my letter to try and revoke Murdoch’s U.S. citizenship – I know it was a long shot, but I did what I could).

I’m mentioning this now because of Jane Mayer’s recent article about the show that appeared in The New Yorker. I knew the writer and this publication would give me a thorough education on this show and any related background information short of actually watching it.

And to be fair, I guess I should discuss some of my T.V. viewing habits, to the extent that I have any.

I watch very little cable T.V. and virtually no network T.V., mainly because of time constraints and child indulgence but also because I have no wish to partake in recycled cop shows, hospital dramas or “reality” television. Sometimes we’ll watch “What Not To Wear” after the young one has exhausted us for the day (yeah, not something I guess I should admit being a guy, but file it under “keeping the peace”), “Whose Line Is It Anyway?,” or something else on the History or Discovery Channels, but that doesn’t happen very often.

Partly for these reasons (but for others I will note shortly), I refuse to make “24” part of my life.

This show is the creation of Joel Surnow, somebody who apparently scuffled along in and out of Hollywood for awhile as a peripheral character of sorts before he hit it big with this show. Congratulations (and by the way, I think this picture from the magazine article speaks volumes about this guy).

As Mayer notes…

The series, Surnow told me, is “ripped out of the Zeitgeist of what people’s fears are—their paranoia that we’re going to be attacked,” and it “makes people look at what we’re dealing with” in terms of threats to national security. “There are not a lot of measures short of extreme measures that will get it done,” he said, adding, “America wants the war on terror fought by Jack Bauer (the show’s protagonist of a sort played by Kiefer Sutherland - pictured). He’s a patriot.”

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. Not long after September 11th, Vice-President Dick Cheney alluded vaguely to the fact that America must begin working through the “dark side” in countering terrorism.

And “Deadeye Dick” would know all about “the dark side,” wouldn’t he? And part of that in the show’s universe includes torture, or, as stated in the article, “suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.”

On “24,” the dark side is on full view. Surnow, who has jokingly called himself a “right-wing nut job,” shares his show’s hard-line perspective. Speaking of torture, he said, “Isn’t it obvious that if there was a nuke in New York City that was about to blow—or any other city in this country—that, even if you were going to go to jail, it would be the right thing to do?”

It looks like Surnow has done a good job of capitalizing on the fact that, to me, this country suffered a nervous breakdown on September 11th, resulting in a festival of lizard-brained paranoia that has brought us the Iraq war, the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and this television program.

As Mayer notes further…

Since September 11th, depictions of torture have become much more common on American television. Before the attacks, fewer than four acts of torture appeared on prime-time television each year, according to Human Rights First, a nonprofit organization. Now there are more than a hundred, and, as David Danzig, a project director at Human Rights First, noted, “the torturers have changed. It used to be almost exclusively the villains who tortured. Today, torture is often perpetrated by the heroes.” The Parents’ Television Council, a nonpartisan watchdog group, has counted what it says are sixty-seven torture scenes during the first five seasons of “24”—more than one every other show. Melissa Caldwell, the council’s senior director of programs, said, “ ‘24’ is the worst offender on television: the most frequent, most graphic, and the leader in the trend of showing the protagonists using torture.”

The show’s villains usually inflict the more gruesome tortures: their victims are hung on hooks, like carcasses in a butcher shop; poked with smoking-hot scalpels; or abraded with sanding machines. In many episodes, however, heroic American officials act as tormentors, even though torture is illegal under U.S. law. (The United Nations Convention Against Torture, which took on the force of federal law when it was ratified by the Senate in 1994, specifies that “no exceptional circumstances, whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”)

And how do “those weak-kneed liberals” on the show result to all of this alpha-male, testosterone-infused activity?

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. A tremulous liberal, who defends a Middle Eastern neighbor from vigilantism, is killed when the neighbor turns out to be a terrorist. When a civil-liberties-minded lawyer makes a high-toned argument to a Presidential aide against unwarranted detentions—“You continue to arrest innocent people, you’re giving the terrorists exactly what they want,” she says—the aide sarcastically responds, “Well! You’ve got the makings of a splendid law-review article here. I’ll pass it on to the President.”

In another episode, a human-rights lawyer from a fictional organization called Amnesty Global tells Bauer, who wants to rough up an uncharged terror suspect, that he will violate the Constitution. Bauer responds, “I don’t wanna bypass the Constitution, but these are extraordinary circumstances.” He appeals to the President, arguing that any interrogation permitted by the law won’t be sufficiently harsh. “If we want to procure any information from this suspect, we’re going to have to do it behind closed doors,” he says.

“You’re talking about torturing this man?” the President says.

“I’m talking about doing what’s necessary to stop this warhead from being used against us,” Bauer answers.

When the President wavers, Bauer temporarily quits his job so that he can avoid defying the chain of command, and breaks the suspect’s fingers. The suspect still won’t talk, so Bauer puts a knife to his throat; this elicits the desired information. He then knocks the suspect out with a punch, telling him, “This will help you with the pain.”

Splendid - exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind, I'm sure.

Mayer’s article also notes the objections to the series raised by U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, with Gen. Finnegan voicing these concerns directly to Surnow and Bob Cochran, the show’s co-creator with Surnow. As you may expect with a program that commands such a huge audience share as they say in the T.V. biz, it turns out that students at the academy think the show is way cool and see no issues with the interrogation methods that are depicted.

Of course, Surnow and company dismiss these arguments with the typical, “well, we’re not all conservatives on this show” equivocating and try to show some feeble recognition of the fact that this show is nothing but a commercial for a country that, at its worst moments after 9/11, fails to recognize basic civil liberties or due process.

And, as Mayer notes, it doesn’t help also that President Brainless has climbed on board the “24” band wagon also…

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. Last September, President Bush defended the C.I.A.’s use of “an alternative set of procedures.” In order to “save innocent lives,” he said, the agency needed to be able to use “enhanced” measures to extract “vital information” from “dangerous” detainees who were aware of “terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else.”

Personally, I’d be inclined to believe Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator in the war in Iraq, who said, “In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence…if anything, physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up.”

And as you may know or could easily surmise, the wingnuts, among others, absolutely love this show, with Surnow (who has extensive contacts among the big names) counting Cyrus Nowrasteh, the hack who is responsible for “The Path To 9/11,” among his friends (as well as Flush Limbore, for whom Surnow had a “24” evening jacket made that the OxyContin addict could wear presumably while indulging in brandy and cigars).

Also included in the aforementioned group is Head of Homeland Security Mike (“City Of Louisiana”) Chertoff who said that “24” “depicts real life” (God, that man is an idiot!).

I was also somewhat surprised to learn on further investigation that this show airs at 9:00 PM in most T.V. markets in this country. With a slot like that, someone would have to be truly naïve to think that children aren’t actually watching this pornography.

I guess this makes me a dinosaur, but I want nothing whatsoever to do with this mess; I’ll satisfy myself with occasional other prime-time shows and movie reruns instead. I’ll gladly settle for misty, water-colored memories (and Babs a fan too? Say it ain’t so!) of programs that represent a time when our government advocated tolerance, self-respect and basic human dignity as opposed to exploding into eruptions of glee as human beings are stabbed, electrocuted, attacked with power tools or beaten with phone books.

Hey, I just realized that I saw that last method used in “The Falcon And The Snowman” with Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton, but I don’t think Surnow has tried that yet. He can go ahead and work that into the next episode; I won’t come knocking for a royalty, since I’m not the same type of mercenary he seems to be.

And here’s another idea for Surnow; write a story where Jack Bauer has to rumble up “Route Irish” in Iraq in a Humvee without doors knowing he could be fragged at any moment by an IED or an EFP. Or is that a little too much reality for him?

Update 8/15/07: Gosh, bad luck on that "comedy" show of yours Joel, you hammerhead.

Update 2/16/08: Ugh (h/t Atrios).