Left News and Views

…only if you’re Jack Bauer.

Human Rights First had this to say about good old Jack:

No character on TV uses torture more than Jack Bauer, the hero of the FOX program “24″ which begins its 7th season on Sunday night. In Bauer’s hands torture appears to be the perfect tool to fight terrorism.

As the The New York Times and Washington Post reported, this season of “24″ will make the debate over the use of torture central to the plot line. We are concerned about this development.

Two years ago Human Rights First began to investigate how “24,” which has shown 89 scenes of torture in its first six seasons, influenced the thinking and the actions of young people in the armed services.  We learned that some junior soldiers — even some interrogators at Guantanamo Bay — had copied abusive interrogation techniques they saw depicted on the program. And military educators told us that “24″ was the biggest problem they had in their classrooms.

… the words of real world interrogators who explain that Bauer’s tactics would never work in the field.

…

This season of “24″ will make the debate over the use of torture central to the plot line. To date torture has been a part of the action but its use and effectiveness has not been debated explicitly at length by the characters. Though we expect a more nuanced discussion of these tactics than has ever been broadcast before by the program we fear that the take home message of the series has been — and always will be — that torture is effective and can be justified.

More than 13 million people are likely to watch the first episode. The 7th season will also be broadcasted overseas in dozens of countries, including in the Middle East.

We believe “24″ will help set the tenor of the public debate over interrogation policy in this country and abroad.

Don't mess with Jack!

Of course it works for Jack. He’s a fictional character on a tv show. If it didn’t work for him the writers would get fired!

The thing is the writers use torture because it’s more dramatic and entertaining than the truth. Good intel requires years of boring, tedious, detail work building networks and establishing connections between various factions and individuals than would not make for good tv.

A lot of people wish for that “magic pill” that will fix all of our problems in one neat, easy solution. We like to think that real world problems can be fixed as easily as they are on television. Unfortunately, what you see on television has very little to do with what the world really is.