re: #94 palomino

Yeah, I think that was one of the many “enhanced interrogation” techniques used by Jack Bauer over the years.

I don’t mind violence in TV and movies at all. Horror is one of my favorite genres. Except when it verges on torture porn. After a few years watching 24, I got sick of it because it kept moving in that direction.

In one episode, Bauer’s team captured a guy and held him in an interrogation room. You thought Jack might torture him but he just walked in and shot the guy dead on the spot in order to scare some other bad guy.

In another, he shot a guy’s wife to make the guy give up info. And in another, he staged the execution of a guy’s entire family to get info. In TVLand, the good guy always knows the bad guy is hiding X. So problematic moral implications just disappear. Problem is, reality isn’t TVLand.

The thing about the show that was probably most damaging to the national dialog on torture is that it sold the plausibility of the immediate, existential crisis. Where you KNOW there’s a nuclear / chemical / biological bomb in the city, or some assassination plot is in progress, and you KNOW that they guy you have in custody has information that can lead you to it.

The entire setup was so elaborately contrived to sell the necessity of extraordinary measures that the ideology behind it was obvious.