Right-wingers, beside themselves over the imminent end of
America’s torture program, think they have found vindication in Jack Bauer’s
testimony before a Senate committee in the season premier of 24. With his trademark somber straightforwardness, Jack schools
the caricatured liberals who dare to grill him about his personal use of
advanced interrogation methods. Those pussies. Who the hell do they think they
are, dragging Jack Fucking Bauer in to defend the tactics he has used to
protect the United goddamned States of America? Nearly everyone Jack encounters
in the first four hours of the season expresses their outrage that Jack is
being subjected to such a fiasco. It doesn’t take long before FBI agents,
skeptical of Jack and his techniques, realize that only torture can save the
world.
And there you have it. Torture is good. Liberal pussies are bad. America will perish at the hands of terrorists if we don’t torture someone. Anyone. Soon!
Except that 24 is a fictional world in which nuclear, chemical, and/or biological annihilation is always less than 24 hours away. And when Jack manages to get himself into a locked room with the one person who possesses earth-shatteringly important information – as he does in every single critical situation – we, the television audience, have the benefit of knowing that the villain possesses such information as we watch Jack drill holes through various body parts. Also, Jack has always been crystal clear about his willingness to be held accountable for his actions, being fully aware that his actions, when examined in the context of an actual ticking bomb scenario, would undoubtedly be vindicated – unless the writers wanted to make a point.
Ticking bomb scenarios are the chimerical wet dreams of neo-cons. No rational human being would condemn Jack Bauer for the actions depicted on 24. If someone took my son – and if I were a freakishly brilliant super agent – I would perform unspeakably violent acts on any person who possessed information that might get him back. Admirably, Jack loves his country that much. I hope that there are agents like Jack Bauer out there, ready to take a terrorist to the mat when lives are literally hanging in the balance.
But our use of torture these last seven years has not resembled what you see on TV. We’ve simply been rounding up Arabs, refusing to charge or try them, and pretending to drown them in the hopes that they might know something. Some of them have been very bad guys, for sure. Others, it appears, were in the wrong place at the wrong time – a situation our soldiers could easily find themselves in during future conflicts. And that’s the point of the Geneva Convention. It’s a gentleman’s agreement, designed to prevent indiscriminate torture. Jack breaks the rules when it's the ONLY option - not when it's AN option, as it always is.
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