Puffin’s Place

Most of us have read reports of the impact of the torture-ready Fox tv show 24 on the Administration’s reframing of interrogation guidelines and the rise of Jack Bauer among the fantasist policy makers in the Bush White House..

A recent (August 4, 2008) issue of Newsweek develops this scenario:

According to British lawyer and writer [Philippe] Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early “brainstorming meetings” of military officials at Guantánamo in September 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial interrogation techniques including waterboarding, sexual humiliation and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer “gave people lots of ideas.” Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security chief, gushed in a panel discussion on “24″ organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show”reflects real life.”

I don’t know how many viewers were initially intrigued by the concept of 24 and the theme lines that 9/11 made so immediate. I would like to know, even more, how many of these viewers gradually stopped watching the show as Jack Bauer summoned forth his electrodes and finger vises more and more regularly. More scarey still, how many young viewers learned by rote that torture in the name of one’s country is true and noble?

I began thinking about all of the above the other night as I was watching Discovery’s new crime channel which includes a fairly new show called Real Interrogations. The opening epigraph for the show pronounces proudly—over a background of detectives shrieking threateningly at huddled suspects—something like See how the police break those who break the law.

The goal of police interrogators is to break people? A person of interest is automatically a law-breaker? Screaming, threatening, waving fingers and arms, looming in the face of the befuddled is the function of the police? I have long thought that allowing police to flat-out lie to those they may deem suspicious ought to be made illegal. Given the understandable imbalance between he/she who is seated across from the good guy/bad guy dancers and the police personnel, I see no reason to brag about the latter “breaking” the former.

So far we save our most repellent forms of torture for those not like ourselves. But can we not notice that our treatment of each other makes intimidation, threats, and lies the standard way for officials to torment whomever they may decide is guilty.

Remember Ari Fleischer, as Bush’s press secretary, warned from the podium that this time (9/11) was not the time to be careless about one’s speech. Then we welcomed the Patriot Act, neither patriotic nor aimed at anything except bundling all power and rights into the paunches of the senile Oval Office denizens. The guys who worshipped Jack Bauer because they were not at risk for violence began an eight-year feast on the civil rights of others.

And so, every Barney Fife becomes a Dick Cheney, and bullying passes for keeping order.