Jack Bauer: Prisoner 24

Uncivil Disobedience

Reading John McQuaid thoughtful piece on “The Jack Bauer Decade” yesterday, brought back a flood of unwelcome images, conversations, transcripts and interviews, all swirling around one toxic activity: torture.

In 2004 I was reporting on Abu Ghraib for Rolling Stone magazine when a source who insisted on anonymity gave me the then-classified “annexes” to the “Taguba Report,” the first in-depth military inquiry into allegations of torture at the infamous military prison in Iraq.

There were thousands of pages of horror to sort through, detailed descriptions of physical and mental outrages that are now familiar stuff but which left me in a nightmarish fog. Over the next two years, as I dug deeper, one interview led to another, as they normally do. A guard from Abu Ghraib gave me the name of an interpreter who passed me along to an interrogator who had a buddy call me — also a graduate of Abu Ghraib, etc.

Sometime after that, I became addicted to the show 24. It only lasted a season, but one that was compressed and intensified by the fact that I watched it on DVD — episode after episode for hours.

Interrogators I interviewed never used the phrase “ticking time-bomb,” but some came close, with references to needing to get the location of “high value targets,” dangerous men, hiding and plotting mayhem against American troops. In 24, of course, an actual ticking time-bomb was at center stage. The metaphor was reality for Jack Bauer, and we got to (had to) go inside his head and ask that inevitable and all important question: “What would I do” under the same circumstances?

Would I torture someone if by my actions I would be assured of saving millions of lives? (Of course this presumed that by choosing NOT to torture another human, there was a high — say 90% — probability that millions would die.)

The answer I couldn’t escape was that, yes, under those precise circumstances, I, too, would commit torture.

But we can’t allow the debate to end there. As McQuaid pointed out, this argument always revolves around issues other than consequences. Anything but consequences. That’s unfortunate, because once you turn to the question of responsibility and justice, the answer seems simple, at least at the individual level. Torture is a crime, and must remain one. We saw what happens when torture is tolerated for a ticking time-bomb scenario. First, every scrap of information turns into the deactivation code for a time-bomb, requiring torture to save countless lives. Next, with torture allowed as a tool in the interrogators box, the brutality spreads to others who are aware, more or less, of its use.

The answer, then, is to leave torture as it is — or as it was before Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Yoo and the rest of the gang came along. Torture is and must remain, illegal under any circumstance.

The certainty of cause and effect that’s taken for granted in 24 almost never occurs in the real world. That’s one difference between life portrayed versus life lived. If Jack Bauer’s dilemma ever manifests in life this is what I hope would happen. Bauer tortures the person with the code, saving millions of lives and then demands, and is granted, a long prison term.

Draconian? It’s hard for me to think so when soldiers are giving their lives daily in defense of our country. We seem somehow to accept the need for their sacrifice.

If there’s one thing I learned from Abu Ghraib it’s that those who torture must face the consequences. How high up the chain of command should that go? That’s easy: As high as the truth leads.