Prime Time Torture

Human Rights First has launched an initiative known as Prime Time Torture that seeks to address the issue of torture on television. It laments the fact that “it used to be that only villains on television tortured. Today, ‘good guy’ and heroic American characters torture — and this torture is depicted as necessary, effective and even patriotic.”

I actually think that Human Rights First is onto something. It is difficult to watch the torture that occurs in some of these shows and I think it does have the potential to influence the attitudes of Americans. I say this because that is precisely what some of my students said when we discussed torture in my international law class. They explicitly relied on television as one reference point in the discussion about permissble and impermissible interrogation techniques. If that is true of extremely bright law students, I can well imagine it might be true of the average American.

The problem is the Prime Time Torture campaign is not done very well. It includes an interview with a former U.S. Army interrogator Tony Lagouranis, who states that “We were encouraged to be creative with our interrogation techniques. In fact, in the official rules of engagement published by the Pentagon it said interrogators need to be creative in their interrogation techniques, in their approaches, and so people they wanted to go in there and create their own techniques and the way they did this was by drawing on popular culture because as I said our training wasn’t useful to us anymore, our training was out the window, we had no official doctrine about what to do, and so people were watching movies and watching TV and they were getting their ideas from that.”

It then argues in the next section that “Hollywood writers, of course, did not create the environment that led to the torture and abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere; the U.S. government created this environment by authorizing coercive interrogation techniques, departing from the long-held absolute ban on torture and cruel treatment, suspending the Geneva Conventions, and by assigning soldiers to tasks for which they were not trained.”

Is it just me or does this not sound completely circular? The interrogator just said that there was no official doctrine about what to do (which of course is incorrect) and the training wasn’t useful anymore, so the government interrogators relied on popular culture for guidance to fill in the gaps about how to do “creative” interrogation. But then Human Rights First argues that popular culture just follows the government’s lead, which created the environment in the first place by authorizing torture. They may as well have interviewed a Hollywood screenwriter and quoted him as saying, “We were encouraged to be creative with our depictions of interrogation techniques. We wanted to go in there and create our own techniques and the way we did this was by drawing on the government’s approaches because we were not trained in how to do this so we were watching the government’s techniques and we were getting our ideas from that.” So which is it? The government interrogators following Hollywood or Hollywood following the government interrogators?

And then there is the poll asking whether mock executions, such as the one Jack Bauer staged on the TV show “24” would be legal under U.S. and international law. Guess what? 81% percent of those surveyed said they did not think that it would be legal. So apparently average Americans are smart enough to know that what Jack Bauer is doing is illegal, but the government interrogators are not. And then when you are invited to click through to learn what international law really says about mock executions, you get … a broken link. Oh well.