Torture, TV and the war on terror

28 Feb 2007 11:37:00 GMT

Blogged by: Peter Apps

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Keifer Sutherland, star of hit TV series "24". REUTERS/Fred Prouser Accusing violent television of promoting violence may be nothing new, but this article by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker brings the debate into the world of geopolitics and human rights.

Set in real-time, the TV series "24" pits U.S. federal agent Jack Bauer against a range of conspirators aiming to inflict death and destruction. With the clock ticking to disaster, there is often no time for the niceties.

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The show has aired around the world, and the DVDs - both pirate and legitimate - sold from Seattle to Sri Lanka. Bad guys get tortured, crucial intelligence is gained, the plot is foiled and lives saved in the nick of time.

"Whatever it takes," is the show's mantra. "Everyone breaks eventually."

War, conflict and the darker side of counterinsurgency have always been objects of fascination. George Orwell's dictum that good people only sleep well at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf appears to still hold.

For some, the fact that there is even a "debate" over torture is shocking enough - and makes pressuring developing countries to improve their human rights record much more difficult.

"When I went into the human rights field, I never dreamed we would be talking about whether torture was justified," Human Rights Watch senior legal adviser Jim Ross told Reuters. "And I never dreamed the debate will be taking place inside the United States."

The New Yorker reports that encouraged by the success of torture in "24", young U.S. army interrogators are using the same techniques in Iraq and Afghanistan - to the concern of others in the military.

A group of senior U.S. army officers - mainly lawyers - even went to see the show's producers to try and persuade them to cut back.

In reality, many experts say torture simply does not work. Either the victim does not break at all, or they will simply say anything to get it to stop. From Jane Mayer's article, it appears the producers are unconvinced.

"They say torture doesn't work," co-creator and executive producer Joel Surnow told her. "But I don't believe that... Tell me, what would you do? If someone had one of my children or my wife, I would hope I'd do it."

But in reality, it is rarely that simple. It can almost never be certain that a suspect holds life-saving information.

And all too often, it is barely about information at all. Covering the war in Sri Lanka, I occasionally saw the bodies of young men who disappeared near army camps and were found covered in blood, bones broken and a bullet in the head.

There was almost never the suggestion that they had been tortured to find a ticking bomb - more often, it was simply revenge for an ambush or attack on a military.

But what it could achieve was intimidation. In April of last year, I saw families fleeing an ethnic Tamil village into rebel Tamil Tiger Territory after the torture and killing of just one local young man.

The fear is that once torture or abuse is condoned at all, it can fast become more widespread.

When I asked Sri Lankan army officers or officials about abuse, they at first denied it but often then admitted it might occasionally take place.

But without exception they pointed the finger at a "few bad eggs". And then they pointed to reported abuses from Guantanamo to Iraq and asked why they were being held to a higher standard than the United States.

But the last word should perhaps belong to the lead writer of "24", Howard Gordon, with perhaps the scariest quote ever to feature in an entertainment story.

"The truth is, there is a certain amount of fatigue setting in," he told the New Yorker. "It's harder not to repeat the same torture techniques over and over."