海角大神

In the wake of the release last week of the Senate Intelligence Committee鈥檚 report on CIA torture during the early years of the War On Terror, there has been much discussion about how the American people have seemingly come to accept the idea that there were horrible, possibly illegal, acts committed by agents of the American government in the name of protecting the nation from another 9/11-style attack. The perception that this was something that the American public would support has been verified over and over again in polling that was taken long before the report was released and, now, in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll that shows that a majority of Americans think that聽torture was justified in the wake of the Sept.11th attacks:

Numbers such as this have led many to wonder whether culture has had an impact on how Americans view the use of torture, and many of have focused on a television show that premiered just under two months after the Sept. 11 attacks themselves聽and, through eight seasons, came to epitomize for many a view of America鈥檚 counterterrorism war where torture and brutality were a way of doing business:

Brian Lowry makes a similar point in聽Variety, where he accused the show and of 鈥渓iberal Hollywood鈥� of聽鈥渃arrying water鈥� for torture:

Given all of that, it seems reasonable to ask whether聽pop culture 鈥� along with news operations whose 鈥淣ews Alert鈥� headlines stoked post-Sept. 11 fears 鈥� has been partially complicit in cultivating the conditions that allowed torture to be聽deemed聽a viable option.

Speaking just for myself, I was a fan of 24 from the beginning right up until the end, and when it came back for聽the London-based miniseries this summer, I didn鈥檛 miss an episode, which given the way my viewing habits had changed in the four years since the show went off the air at the end of its eighth season. There were some seasons I enjoyed far more than others, some plot lines that I found either utterly annoying 鈥� (cough) anything involving Kim Bauer (caugh) 鈥撀�or completely implausible and, when it did go off the air at the end of eight seasons, it seemed as if the time was right. This was true not just because there were only so many times that Jack Bauer could save the world single-handed in a 24 hour period, and only so many plausible plot scenarios to drive a season-long drama series, but also because it seemed like the series had run its course. As many had observed when the show ended in 2010, the story of聽24聽in the end was as much about Jack Bauer and what he had given up to save his country. At the beginning of the series, he starts out with a family that is already on the brink of splitting apart due to the stresses of his job, indeed most of the first season is as much about Bauer trying to safe his wife and daughter as it is about the primary plot of an assassination attempt on a candidate for president of the United States. By the end of the final season, he鈥檚 a man without a country, and without a family, who had been told聽just a few years earlier by one of the few people who was still close to him, 鈥淵ou're cursed, Jack. Everything you touch, one way or another, ends up dead.鈥�

Yes, there was a lot of violence and indeed torture along the way, but it always struck me that there was a moral context to what was happening on the screen. Not only was it the case that it was usually the 鈥渂ad guys鈥� who were getting tortured, but we could see along the way that using this type of violence was having an increasingly negative impact on our putative hero. Now, perhaps, not everyone drew that lesson from the show but it was there nonetheless, and whether you look at the final scenes of the eighth season, or the final scenes of the most recent miniseries, you certainly can鈥檛 say that utilizing these methods of torture was something that had a positive impact on Bauer, or on anyone around him. Indeed, in the end, it seemed as though all it did was help to destroy the things that meant the most to him. That鈥檚 a lesson not too different from films like聽The Godfather,聽where the protagonist Michael Corleone saw everything he cared about most destroyed by the very means he was using to try to preserve them.

Additionally, despite the fact that I was a regular聽24聽viewer, I can鈥檛 say that the show ever really had a significant influence on my opinions regarding torture and its use in the War on Terror. Watching the series for some eight years certainly didn鈥檛 make me think that torture was a good thing, or that it was appropriate for the United States to be using methods such as those we saw depicted on television in fighting the War on Terror. While I can鈥檛 speak for the rest of America, I would suggest that the people who would blame a television show for either the policy itself or the fact that Americans seem to be generally okay with the use of torture in the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks are placing far more importance on the impact of a show that hasn鈥檛 aired regularly in more than four years now. For one thing, while the show was聽critically acclaimed聽and received聽a host of awards and nominations during the time it was on the air, it鈥檚 worth noting that聽24聽was never really a 鈥渉it鈥� show. It was聽only in the Top 25 in the Nielsen rankings for two of its eight seasons, for example, and for all but its first three seasons was often competing against much higher-drawing content such as Monday Night Football. To the extent it was a hit, it was a cult hit that survived in part by word of mouth, and in part because it was airing on Fox, which didn鈥檛 exactly have a lot of high-viewership shows on the air at the time. Given those numbers, it seems to me to be somewhat of a stretch to credit the show with having the kind of impact on American public opinion that the arguments above would attribute to it.

In the end, if you are looking for a reason why the American public has generally not been outraged by the revelations, both recently in the Intelligence Committee reports and in reports that have come out in the past, of the use of torture in the War on Terror, I would look to something far more basic than a television show. In the wake of the Sept. 11th attacks, the sense of fear in the US that more attacks were coming was palpable, and it has never really gone away. To some extent, this can be attributed to the news media hypes reports of terror threats, but I think that it can ultimately just be attributed to fear on the part of the public, fear that is stoked by politicians and law enforcement on a regular basis. How else can you explain the manner in which Americans have so easily accepted restrictions on their personal freedoms that many would have been screaming about just a few years before September 11, 2001? People complain, but we all dutifully line up to take off our shoes and belts before getting on an airplane, for example, and even the reaction to the revelations about N.S.A. spying has had only a limited political impact. Once you instill a sense of fear in the population, they鈥檒l accept just about anything. Jack Bauer had nothing to do with that.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.