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Complete text of "''24' Turns to Torture". Kept here because I'm sure that the story will disappear from the web and I will eventually want to reread it.
'24' Turns to Torture
By Kate O'Hare
To torture or not to torture -- it's a question as old as human civilization and as recent as today's headlines.
The revelation of alleged prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq pushed the issue to the forefront in Spring 2004, right about the time Howard Gordon and his fellow executive producers on FOX's "24" were starting to think about their fourth season, which premiered in January.
"I'm pretty sure," Gordon says, "that Abu Ghraib had very little to do with [our show]. That was neither an inspiration ... it really wasn't anything. It was, again, real life imitating art in a way. It's not prophetic on our part. It's a narrative reality, whether in fiction or real life, that there are abuses.
"There are inevitable abuses, there is inevitable testing of the line when people are in this position."
Of course, in each season of "24," airing Mondays, the conceit is that counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) only has 24 hours to avert some sort of disaster -- or even multiple disasters. He doesn't exactly have time to ask politely.
"There's a time-sensitive threat," Gordon says, "and the expedient and non-due-process way of getting an answer from a resistant witness or someone who might know something, is torture. It became a Jack Bauer hallmark. It's not something that's good or something that we're advocating doing, but something that always has a price."
In the past, Jack has either shot or threatened to shoot many people, lopped off one prisoner's head and threatened another prisoner's family. Jack has also been the subject of torture, to the point of heart failure.
This season, Jack shot a suspect in the leg, held up a convenience store to buy time and improvised a torture device out of a hotel ice bucket and a lamp to get information from a reluctant civilian (James Frain).
But it's about more than just Jack. Back at the Counter Terrorist Unit, the Secretary of Defense (William Devane) allowed sensory deprivation techniques to be used on his rebellious son (Logan Marshall-Green) to see if he had betrayed his father; and CTU director Erin Driscoll (Alberta Watson) ordered physical torture in the interrogation of a CTU employee (Lana Parrilla) who turned out to have been falsely accused.
So along the way, the guilty, the maybe guilty and the definitely innocent have all suffered.
"We do have the advantage here," Gordon says, "in our fictional world, of knowing that the people we torture are, in fact, bad guys. Although, we tortured a girl whose only sin really was snottiness. She didn't deserve to get Tasered the way she did. I don't know if we ever paid the price, karmically, for that particular event, but Erin was terribly remorseful.
"There's an episode coming up, I think it's 18, where the president stops the extreme interrogation of a suspect. There's a proxy organization, like an Amnesty International, that stands on due process and the illegality of torture. So the legal aspect of torture gets introduced as a story element."
While the real-life Commander in Chief and his Cabinet appointees answer questions from the press and Congress about the administration's policy on torture, the political stance of "24's" fictional POTUS (Geoff Pierson) remains a mystery.
"President Keeler unfortunately has been too much of a cipher," Gordon says. "He's a very good, solid president, but because we didn't give him a family context or a political context, except for the ongoing political crisis, he has become a cipher.
"I don't want to reveal any story plots, but we're going to do something about that."
While "24" has examined many reasons for torture, Gordon admits that it hasn't been entirely realistic in depicting its results.
"There are studies," Gordon says, "that are written that suggest that torture is not effective, that people will say whatever you want them to say -- as the Inquisition discovered, as they found out in Algeria.
"I suppose, to be fair, Jack tends to be very effective. Torture, in '24,' tends to be an effective thing. Perhaps that's the only thing that's not fair about our portrayal of torture is its inefficacy.
"Jack hasn't tortured the innocent, and he hasn't tortured someone to no effect."
Original from Zap2It, by Kate O'Hare 3/16/2005
'24' Turns to Torture
By Kate O'Hare
To torture or not to torture -- it's a question as old as human civilization and as recent as today's headlines.
The revelation of alleged prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq pushed the issue to the forefront in Spring 2004, right about the time Howard Gordon and his fellow executive producers on FOX's "24" were starting to think about their fourth season, which premiered in January.
"I'm pretty sure," Gordon says, "that Abu Ghraib had very little to do with [our show]. That was neither an inspiration ... it really wasn't anything. It was, again, real life imitating art in a way. It's not prophetic on our part. It's a narrative reality, whether in fiction or real life, that there are abuses.
"There are inevitable abuses, there is inevitable testing of the line when people are in this position."
Of course, in each season of "24," airing Mondays, the conceit is that counter-terrorist agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) only has 24 hours to avert some sort of disaster -- or even multiple disasters. He doesn't exactly have time to ask politely.
"There's a time-sensitive threat," Gordon says, "and the expedient and non-due-process way of getting an answer from a resistant witness or someone who might know something, is torture. It became a Jack Bauer hallmark. It's not something that's good or something that we're advocating doing, but something that always has a price."
In the past, Jack has either shot or threatened to shoot many people, lopped off one prisoner's head and threatened another prisoner's family. Jack has also been the subject of torture, to the point of heart failure.
This season, Jack shot a suspect in the leg, held up a convenience store to buy time and improvised a torture device out of a hotel ice bucket and a lamp to get information from a reluctant civilian (James Frain).
But it's about more than just Jack. Back at the Counter Terrorist Unit, the Secretary of Defense (William Devane) allowed sensory deprivation techniques to be used on his rebellious son (Logan Marshall-Green) to see if he had betrayed his father; and CTU director Erin Driscoll (Alberta Watson) ordered physical torture in the interrogation of a CTU employee (Lana Parrilla) who turned out to have been falsely accused.
So along the way, the guilty, the maybe guilty and the definitely innocent have all suffered.
"We do have the advantage here," Gordon says, "in our fictional world, of knowing that the people we torture are, in fact, bad guys. Although, we tortured a girl whose only sin really was snottiness. She didn't deserve to get Tasered the way she did. I don't know if we ever paid the price, karmically, for that particular event, but Erin was terribly remorseful.
"There's an episode coming up, I think it's 18, where the president stops the extreme interrogation of a suspect. There's a proxy organization, like an Amnesty International, that stands on due process and the illegality of torture. So the legal aspect of torture gets introduced as a story element."
While the real-life Commander in Chief and his Cabinet appointees answer questions from the press and Congress about the administration's policy on torture, the political stance of "24's" fictional POTUS (Geoff Pierson) remains a mystery.
"President Keeler unfortunately has been too much of a cipher," Gordon says. "He's a very good, solid president, but because we didn't give him a family context or a political context, except for the ongoing political crisis, he has become a cipher.
"I don't want to reveal any story plots, but we're going to do something about that."
While "24" has examined many reasons for torture, Gordon admits that it hasn't been entirely realistic in depicting its results.
"There are studies," Gordon says, "that are written that suggest that torture is not effective, that people will say whatever you want them to say -- as the Inquisition discovered, as they found out in Algeria.
"I suppose, to be fair, Jack tends to be very effective. Torture, in '24,' tends to be an effective thing. Perhaps that's the only thing that's not fair about our portrayal of torture is its inefficacy.
"Jack hasn't tortured the innocent, and he hasn't tortured someone to no effect."
Original from Zap2It, by Kate O'Hare 3/16/2005
