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Report: Jack Bauer "Gave People Lots of Ideas" at Gitmo
Great reporting from Vanity Fair on how administration officials were involved in developing the interrogation techniques to be used at Gitmo. This tidbit is particularly disturbing:
The first year of Fox TV's dramatic series 24 came to a conclusion in spring 2002, and the second year of the series began that fall. An inescapable message of the program is that torture works. "We saw it on cable," Beaver recalled. "People had already seen the first series. It was hugely popular." Jack Bauer had many friends at Guantánamo, Beaver added. "He gave people lots of ideas."
I don't know what's more disturbing: the fact that torture had become so acceptable that folks within the military were taking ideas from TV shows, or the fact that there were so few instructions on how to torture that folks within the military were taking ideas from TV shows.
Immorality plus incompetence. And there's your Bush Administration in a nutshell.
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Maybe the military had no torture "manual" all ready to go (that's a bad thing?) but for a bit of convergent evolution, check out the link on my name: Andrew Sullivan's best blog post ever on Nazi interrogation techniques.
This has been news for awhile. But I thought it had died, so I'm glad you all are still on it.
From Democracy Now 2/22/07:
"This past fall [2006], the Dean of West Point, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, along with experienced military and FBI interrogators and representatives of Human Rights First, met with the creative team behind the hit Fox Television show "24" and [told] them to stop using torture because American soldiers were copying the show's tactics."
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/2/22/is_torture_on_hit_fox_tv
Hahaha! That's hilarious. God, you gotta love America, right? We're so twisted, we dont even realize it.
Hey Congress, how about bringing in Jack Bauer for a hearing on torture? Kiefer Sutherland said this in an interview with Larry King:
"There hasn't been a torture sequence that my character has been involved with that there isn't some kind of a negative repercussion, whether it's emotional. It's very simplistic to try and take what we are doing in this fantasy, in this '24,' which is a television show and try and say that this is a referendum for torture or we are justifying the absolution [he probably meant 'abolition'] of due process or anything like that."
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0701/20/lkl.01.html
Think some GOP heads might explode?
I think if their basing desicions in Washington on television shows they must have been watching Elmer Fudd when they picked their President.
I didn't generally get into 24, I liked "Lost" better, but the only reason torture works on 24 is because it is fiction. Abusing people in any way is useless for obtaining reliable intelligence, Because people will say anything to get the torturer to stop. John MCain was tortured by the NVA and look at what they got him to say when they had him broke. If they had any sense (and left the sadists elsewhere) they would realize the only way to get good intel is to win someone over and co-opt them. But, that isn't as emotionally satisfying as beating the snot out of somebody you have labeled "enemy".