The Fox television show "24" premiered on November 6, 2001. It quickly became the ideological lighthouse for the right, both among the populace and in more rarified venues. Last year, Dahlia Lithwick documented in Slate the main character's influence upon Administration and military officials.
According to British lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, Jack Bauer—played by Kiefer Sutherland—was an inspiration at early "brainstorming meetings" of military officials at Guantanamo in September of 2002. Diane Beaver, the staff judge advocate general who gave legal approval to 18 controversial new interrogation techniques including water-boarding, sexual humiliation, and terrorizing prisoners with dogs, told Sands that Bauer "gave people lots of ideas." Michael Chertoff, the homeland-security chief, once gushed in a panel discussion on 24 organized by the Heritage Foundation that the show "reflects real life.
John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who produced the so-called torture memos—simultaneously redefining both the laws of torture and logic—cites Bauer in his book War by Other Means. "What if, as the popular Fox television program '24' recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?" Even Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, speaking in Canada last summer, shows a gift for this casual toggling between television and the Constitution. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Scalia said. "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"
Although the shows creators, Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, deny that "24" is deliberately made as political propoganda in the service of militarism, it was apparently bought by Fox because it might as well be. In 2007, Jane Mayer wrote in the New Yorker:
Yet David Nevins, the former Fox Television network official who, in 2000, bought the pilot on the spot after hearing a pitch from Surnow and Cochran, and who maintains an executive role in “24,” is candid about the show’s core message. “There’s definitely a political attitude of the show, which is that extreme measures are sometimes necessary for the greater good,” he says. “The show doesn’t have much patience for the niceties of civil liberties or due process. It’s clearly coming from somewhere. Joel’s politics suffuse the whole show.”
It's therefore especially ironic to see the number 24 gain a new relevance in the war on terror. "24" is also, apparently, the number of people held in GITMO, out of approximately 750 total (or, who knows), who were actually suspected of being terrorists. This, according toLawrence Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, writing in the Washington Note:
Simply stated, even for those two dozen or so of the detainees who might well be hardcore terrorists, there was virtually no chain of custody, no disciplined handling of evidence, and no attention to the details that almost any court system would demand. Falling back on "sources and methods" and "intelligence secrets" became the Bush administration's modus operandi to camouflage this grievous failing.
But their ultimate cover was that the struggle in which they were involved was war and in war those detained could be kept for the duration. And this war, by their own pronouncements, had no end. For political purposes, they knew it certainly had no end within their allotted four to eight years. Moreover, its not having an end, properly exploited, would help ensure their eight rather than four years in office.
In addition, it has never come to my attention in any persuasive way--from classified information or otherwise--that any intelligence of significance was gained from any of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay other than from the handful of undisputed ring leaders and their companions, clearly no more than a dozen or two of the detainees, and even their alleged contribution of hard, actionable intelligence is intensely disputed in the relevant communities such as intelligence and law enforcement.
Now, is it just me, or is it interesting to you, too, to learn that the war against what Senator John McCain called around a thousand times last year on the campaign trail "the transcendent evil of our time" has nabbed a total of twenty-four likely terrorists? That would be five more than were on the planes on September 11, 2001.
That is what we got for the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. That is what we got in exchange for giving up our civil liberties (not that we were asked) and God knows how much money. That is what we got for the all the lives of our soldiers and the lives of all those civilians. Suspected terrorists numbering "a dozen or two." Not enough people to fill a Greyhound bus.
Let that number "24" resonate for a new reason, whenever the title of the television show is heard.
(Big h/t to Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse for the OND with the Wilkerson piece.)