How Jack Bauer's TV violence set tone for policymakers

It is easy to forget how the atmosphere in Washington after September 11, 2001, allowed policymakers to cite Jack Bauer, the fictional hero of Fox TV's 24, as some sort of moral compass.

Bauer, who used torture to extract information that prevented the slaughter of innocents, was cited by the likes of Michael Chertoff, the Homeland Security Secretary, to justify policies including “enhanced interrogation techniques”. The Times Online reports.

To give the theory an academic sheen Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard, President Obama's alma mater, set out “the ticking-bomb scenario” in 2002 in which a terrorist who has planted a nuclear device receives some robust questioning.

Seven years later the publication of more than 100 pages of clinical legal prose explaining how far interrogators could go in slamming a suspect's head against a wall (albeit one designed to reduce the possibility of lasting injury) make deeply disturbing reading.

Read full article.

[via TV Tattle]

emily | 6:23 PM | The impact of TV series on society |
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