Beinhart's Body Politic: A Media Guide to Terror, Torture, Morality, and War Crimes

by Larry Beinhart, January 29, 2009

• Terrorists are going to nuke Los Angeles in three hours.

• Agent Jack Bauer has a suspect who knows where the bomb is.

• If Jack Bauer tortures the suspect, he can force him to say where it is, get there in two hours and 59 minutes, stop the bomb, and save 10 million people.

• What should, what must, Jack Bauer do?

That’s a no-brainer. Clip the electrodes to his balls and turn on the juice.

I don’t know how many people have actually watched “24,” but there’s not a person in America who is not familiar with the “ticking-bomb” scenario.

It sounds so darn logical that it’s hard not to buy into it. A remarkable number of people have. Dick Cheney and Michael Chertoff (head of Homeland Security) are big fans and think they’re directing the real-life Jack Bauers. Justice Antonin Scalia said Jack Bauer should not be prosecuted: “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. He saved hundreds of thousands of lives.” Should he be, Alan Dershowitz will be there for the defense!

As a drama, the ticking bomb is thrilling. “24” is The Perils of Pauline on crack. As applied to reality, it is a pernicious and deceitful fantasy.

The reference point is, of course, 9/11.

Before that day, we were soft and naïve. If only we had tortured someone we could have stopped it. And saved American lives!

That, of course, is utterly false. We had quite enough information to have prevented 9/11. It had been gathered through normal and legal police and intelligence methods. It was not used due to bureaucratic infighting, ineptitude, incompetence, excess secrecy, and, most of all, the willful and pointed disregard of that information by Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and George W. Bush.

Now, we’re smart and tough. We do torture-lite and outsource the really evil stuff. Has it worked?

In October 2001, the FBI put out a Most Wanted Terrorists list. It had 22 names on it. As of 2006, 17 of them were still “at large.” Including Osama bin Laden.

Yeah, well, I bet going “to the dark side” stopped a bunch of terrorist attacks.

No. None that we know of.