http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070219fa_fact_mayer
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...The shows appeal, however, lies less in its violence than in its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the ticking time bomb plot. Each hour-long episode represents an hour in the life of the characters, and every minute that passes onscreen brings the United States a minute closer to doomsday. (Surnow came up with this concept, which he calls the shows trick.) As many as half a dozen interlocking stories unfold simultaneouslyfrequently on a split screenand a digital clock appears before and after every commercial break, marking each second with an ominous clang. The result is a riveting sensation of narrative velocity.
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. According to Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the forthcoming book Torture and Democracy, the conceit of the ticking time bomb first appeared in Jean Lartéguys 1960 novel Les Centurions, written during the brutal French occupation of Algeria. The books hero, after beating a female Arab dissident into submission, uncovers an imminent plot to explode bombs all over Algeria and must race against the clock to stop it. Rejali, who has examined the available records of the conflict, told me that the story has no basis in fact. In his view, the story line of Les Centurions provided French liberals a more palatable rationale for torture than the racist explanations supplied by others (such as the notion that the Algerians, inherently simpleminded, understood only brute force). Lartéguys scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societiesthat their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats.
24, which last year won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series, packs an improbable amount of intrigue into twenty-four hours, and its outlandishness marks it clearly as a fantasy, an heir to the baroque potboilers of Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn. Nevertheless, the show obviously plays off the anxieties that have beset the country since September 11th, and it sends a political message. The series, Surnow told me, is ripped out of the Zeitgeist of what peoples fears aretheir paranoia that were going to be attacked, and it makes people look at what were 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. Hes 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 Americas 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. On 24, the dark side is on full view. Surnow, who has jokingly called himself a right-wing nut job, shares his shows hard-line perspective. Speaking of torture, he said, Isnt it obvious that if there was a nuke in New York City that was about to blowor any other city in this countrythat, even if you were going to go to jail, it would be the right thing to do?
This past November, 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, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming. At first, Finneganwearing an immaculate Army uniform, his chest covered in ribbons and medalsaroused confusion: he was taken for an actor and was asked by someone what time his call was.
In fact, Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the shows central political premisethat the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the countrys securitywas 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. Id like them to stop, Finnegan said of the shows producers. They should do a show where torture backfires.
The meeting, which lasted a couple of hours, had been arranged by David Danzig, the Human Rights First official. Several top producers of 24 were present, but Surnow was conspicuously absent. Surnow explained to me, I just cant sit in a room that long. Im too A.D.D.I cant sit still. He told the group that the meeting conflicted with a planned conference call with Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel. (Another participant in the conference call attended the meeting.) Ailes wanted to discuss a project that Surnow has been planning for months: the début, on February 18th, of The Half Hour News Hour, a conservative satirical treatment of the weeks news; Surnow sees the show as offering a counterpoint to the liberal slant of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Before the meeting, Stuart Herrington, one of the three veteran interrogators, had prepared a list of seventeen effective techniques, none of which were abusive. He and the others described various tactics, such as giving suspects a postcard to send home, thereby learning the name and address of their next of kin. After Howard Gordon, the lead writer, listened to some of Herringtons suggestions, he slammed his fist on the table and joked, Youre hired! He also excitedly asked the West Point delegation if they knew of any effective truth serums.
At other moments, the discussion was more strained. Finnegan told the producers that 24, by suggesting that the U.S. government perpetrates myriad forms of torture, hurts the countrys image internationally. Finnegan, who is a lawyer, has for a number of years taught a course on the laws of war to West Point seniorscadets 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? He continued, The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do.
Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point, told me that he had similar arguments with his students. He said that, under both U.S. and international law, Jack Bauer is a criminal. In real life, he would be prosecuted. Yet the motto of many of his students was identical to Jack Bauers: Whatever it takes. His students were particularly impressed by a scene in which Bauer barges into a room where a stubborn suspect is being held, shoots him in one leg, and threatens to shoot the other if he doesnt talk. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense. Solis told me, I tried to impress on them that this technique would open the wrong doors, but it was like trying to stomp out an anthill.
The 24 producers told the military and law-enforcement experts that they were careful not to glamorize torture; they noted that Bauer never enjoys inflicting pain, and that it had clearly exacted a psychological toll on the character. (As Gordon put it to me, Jack is basically damned.) Finnegan and the others disagreed, pointing out that Bauer remains coolly rational after committing barbarous acts, including the decapitation of a states witness with a hacksaw. 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 dont want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems.
Cochran, who has a law degree, listened politely to the delegations complaints. He told me that he supports the use of torture in narrow circumstances and believes that it can be justified under the Constitution. The Doctrine of Necessity says you can occasionally break the law to prevent greater harm, he said. I think that could supersede the Convention Against Torture. (Few legal scholars agree with this argument.) At the meeting, Cochran demanded to know what the interrogators would do if they faced the imminent threat of a nuclear blast in New York City, and had custody of a suspect who knew how to stop it. One interrogator said that he would apply physical coercion only if he received a personal directive from the President. But Navarro, who estimates that he has conducted some twelve thousand interrogations, replied that torture was not an effective response. These are very determined people, and they wont turn just because you pull a fingernail out, he told me. And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. They almost welcome torture, he said. They expect it. They want to be martyred. A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glorythe ticking time bomb will go off!
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.
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. He told the shows staff that DVDs of shows such as 24 circulate widely among soldiers stationed in Iraq. Lagouranis said to me, People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things theyve just seen. He recalled that some men he had worked with in Iraq watched a television program in which a suspect was forced to hear tortured screams from a neighboring cell; the men later tried to persuade their Iraqi translator to act the part of a torture victim, in a similar intimidation ploy. Lagouranis intervened: such scenarios constitute psychological torture.
In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence, Lagouranis told me. I worked with someone who used waterboardingan 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 Humvees 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.
Last December, the Intelligence Science Board, an advisory panel to the U.S. intelligence community, released a report declaring that most observers, even those within professional circles, have unfortunately been influenced by the medias colorful (and artificial) view of interrogation as almost always involving hostility. In a clear reference to 24, the report noted:
Prime-time television increasingly offers up plot lines involving the incineration of metropolitan Los Angeles by an atomic weapon or its depopulation by an aerosol nerve toxin. The characters do not have the time to reflect upon, much less to utilize, what real professionals know to be the science and art of educing information. They want results. Now. The public thinks the same way. They want, and rightly expect, precisely the kind of protection that only a skilled intelligence professional can provide. Unfortunately, they have no idea how such a person is supposed to act in real life.
Lagouranis told the 24 team what the U.S. military and the F.B.I. teach real intelligence professionals: rapport-building, the slow process of winning over informants, is the method that generally works best. There are also nonviolent ruses, he explained, and ways to take suspects by surprise. The 24 staff seemed interested in the narrative possibilities of such techniques; Lagouranis recalled, They told us that theyd love to incorporate ruses and rapport-building. At the same time, he said, Cochran and the others from 24 worried that such approaches would take too much time on an hour-long television show.
The delegation of interrogators left the meeting with the feeling that the story lines on 24 would be changed little, if at all. It shows they have a social conscience that theyd even meet with us at all, Navarro said. They were receptive. But they have a format that works. They have won a lot of awards. Why would they want to play with a No. 1 show? Lagouranis said of the 24 team, They were a bit prickly. They have this money-making machine, and we were telling them its immoral.
Afterward, Danzig and Finnegan had an on-set exchange with Kiefer Sutherland, who is reportedly paid ten million dollars a year to play Jack Bauer. Sutherland, the grandson of Tommy Douglas, a former socialist leader in Canada, has described his own political views as anti-torture, and leaning toward the left. According to Danzig, Sutherland was really upset, really intense and stressed that he tries to tell people that the show is just entertainment. But Sutherland, who claimed to be bored with playing torture scenes, admitted that he worried about the unintended consequences of the show. Danzig proposed that Sutherland participate in a panel at West Point or appear in a training film in which he made clear that the shows torture scenes are not to be emulated. (Surnow, when asked whether he would participate in the video, responded, No way. Gordon, however, agreed to be filmed.) Sutherland declined to answer questions for this article, but, in a recent television interview with Charlie Rose, his ambivalence about his characters methods was palpable. He condemned the abuse of U.S.-held detainees at Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq, as absolutely criminal, particularly for a country that tells others that democracy and freedom are the way to go. He also said, You can torture someone and theyll basically tell you exactly what you want to hear. . . . Torture is not a way of procuring information. But things operate differently, he said, on television: 24, he said, is a fantastical show. . . . Torture is a dramatic device.
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