This week's New Yorker has a great piece about torture on 24. Seems like our president and vice president think the show is a real-world documentary on how to fight international terrorism.
Personally, I think Mary Lynn Rajskub's performance is plenty enough torture for anyone.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
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3 comments:
"The viewer, who knows that the adviser is guilty and harbors secrets, becomes complicit in hoping that the torture works."
To me this was the most important point of the entire article, yet it was severely overlooked.
It is human nature to want "bad guys" to be punished - via torture, imprisonment, forced repeated viewings of "According to Jim", etc.
But this is not about torture, it's about punishment (of ANY kind) without due process.
The thing is, on "24" you always know (or eventually find out) who the real bad guys are, so the end ALWAYS seems to justify the means on the show.
But in real life, how do you really know who is a real terrorist, and who isn't. So the immorality question isn't about HOW to treat terrorists, but WHO to treat as terrorists.
Because otherwise, torturing someone who you KNOW is about to set off a bomb is really the same thing as shooting the burglar who breaks into your house and comes at you with a knife - it's pure self defense. And that ain't illegal or immoral.
It was amazing to me how so many figures in this article (inlcuding the author) seem to be completely missing the point here.
Not exactly, Perl.
Even if you know someone is a terrorist, it's not moral nor good policy to torture him.
Except perhaps in the ticking-bomb type scenario, which seems incredibly unlikely.
The point is that an unlikely scenario (the only kind which is depicted on 24) should not serve as the guideline for a national policy.
Torture of actual terrorists serves to only harden and create more terrorists. Al Zawahiri, Bin Laden's brains, did not become completely unhinged until he was tortured in Egyptian prisons.
We've released hundreds of people from Guantanamo and Abu Graib. What kind of stories do you think they're telling to their friends and family?
We are supposed to be a beacon of hope and decency in a cruel world. When we become as cruel and sick as our enemies, then we aren't protecting anything worth saving.
Which doesn't mean we shouldn't seek out known terrorists and kill them. But we won't know who a terrorist is if we treat them all like one.
Sure you are justified in shooting a burglar who breaks into your home. But that doesn't mean you should savor the moment or shoot unarmed burglars for the hell of it.
A terrorist in custody with real information to share is not going to give up anything valuable because you torture him. But there's a good chance he became a terrorist in the first place because of what you did to his brother.
Agreed - I'm assuming 1)the "ticking time bomb" scenario, and 2) you also know the prisoner has the info you really need. I guess my point was that the second item is so unlikely, almost to the point of impossible. So who would you really be able to torture anyway?
Torturing to attempt to get information which may or not be helpful is at best a pointless exercise, and at worst is fueling the fire of future terrorism as you stated.
And if national policy is really being shaped by TV, then we've got a bigger problem than I thought.
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