More on Prime Time Torture: “24” and the Myth of the Ticking Time Bomb

Like Roger, I have been intrigued (and somewhat disturbed) by the effect of television on student perceptions of torture. One of my students recently responded to an argument that torture is ineffective with a reference to “24,” a program in which, apparently, torture is routinely applied with effective results. I have never seen the program myself, but found Jane Mayer’s piece about the show and the personal politics of producer and co-creator Joel Surnow in this week’s New Yorker quite interesting. Mayer reveals the salience of the “ticking time bomb” trope in the show’s construction:

The show’s appeal, however, lies less in its violence than in its giddily literal rendering of a classic thriller trope: the “ticking time bomb” plot. Each hour-long episode represents an hour in the life of the characters, and every minute that passes onscreen brings the United States a minute closer to doomsday. (Surnow came up with this concept, which he calls the show’s “trick.”) As many as half a dozen interlocking stories unfold simultaneously—frequently on a split screen—and a digital clock appears before and after every commercial break, marking each second with an ominous clang. The result is a riveting sensation of narrative velocity.

Bob Cochran, who created the show with Surnow, admitted, “Most terrorism experts will tell you that the ‘ticking time bomb’ situation never occurs in real life, or very rarely. But on our show it happens every week.” According to Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and the author of the forthcoming book “Torture and Democracy,” the conceit of the ticking time bomb first appeared in Jean Lartéguy’s 1960 novel “Les Centurions,” written during the brutal French occupation of Algeria. The book’s hero, after beating a female Arab dissident into submission, uncovers an imminent plot to explode bombs all over Algeria and must race against the clock to stop it. Rejali, who has examined the available records of the conflict, told me that the story has no basis in fact. In his view, the story line of “Les Centurions” provided French liberals a more palatable rationale for torture than the racist explanations supplied by others (such as the notion that the Algerians, inherently simpleminded, understood only brute force). Lartéguy’s scenario exploited an insecurity shared by many liberal societies—that their enlightened legal systems had made them vulnerable to security threats.

Against the backdrop of the “ticking time bomb,” there is no room on “24” for broad foriegn policy concerns, law or morality:

Throughout the series, secondary characters raise moral objections to abusive interrogation tactics. Yet the show never engages in a serious dialogue on the subject. Nobody argues that torture doesn’t work, or that it undermines America’s foreign-policy strategy. Instead, the doubters tend to be softhearted dupes. A tremulous liberal, who defends a Middle Eastern neighbor from vigilantism, is killed when the neighbor turns out to be a terrorist. When a civil-liberties-minded lawyer makes a high-toned argument to a Presidential aide against unwarranted detentions—“You continue to arrest innocent people, you’re giving the terrorists exactly what they want,” she says—the aide sarcastically responds, “Well! You’ve got the makings of a splendid law-review article here. I’ll pass it on to the President.”

There is a lot more to the article, including discussions of the popularity of the show within the administration, a largely unsuccessful meeting between the producers and writers of the show and US military interrogation experts (arranged by Human Rights First) who objected to the show’s constant depictions of illegal techniques, and a Heritage Foundation round table about the show at which Michael Chertoff declared that the show “reflects real life.” It’s well worth a full read.