I've never been convinced that torture would be any use. According to accounts I've read, like The Interrogators' War, by army interrogator Chris Mackey, Brainwash by Dominic Streatfield or Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine - baloney. Added to this is the French experience, as related in Sir Alastair Horne's history of the Algerian War of Independence, A Savage War of Peace that I read last year. Horne impresses on the reader that torture was used widely and at the discretion of French troops and police, but never proved effective at anything other than destroying the confidence of the French home front in the authorities; there's an online interview with him here.
Now, the American military and police leadership are worried that their troops are being sold on counterproductive brutality by the hit series 24. According to this New Yorker story, the American military and the FBI seem increasingly uneasy with its storylines making the case for torture as a counter-terrorist tool - the constant ticking bomb scenarios, the effectiveness, proven again and again of pain, in producing, useful, accurate and timely information and the utility of drugs as truth serum.
As one conservative TV writer says:
“Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” he said. “It’s a deep, dark ugly world out there. Maybe this is what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business—even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy.”
The show's main writer is a leathery conservative in an overwhelmingly liberal industry:
Surnow said that he found the Clinton years obnoxious. “Hollywood under Clinton—it was like he was their guy,” he said. “He was the yuppie, baby-boomer narcissist that all of Hollywood related to.” During those years, Surnow recalled, he had countless arguments with liberal colleagues, some of whom stopped speaking to him. “My feeling is that the liberals’ ideas are wrong,” he said. “But they think I’m evil.”
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