West Point worries over '24'

cpemma · 3 Apr 2007

[URL=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6510593.stm]BBC[/URL] said:

Anti-terror agent Jack Bauer routinely beats vital clues out of suspects in TV thriller 24. But West Point military academy has asked 24's makers to tone down the torture, worried that cadets might identify too strongly with his anti-terror tactics.

Apparently West Point cadets think the show represents their country's real situation in a dangerous world, and they have started to envisage themselves as counter-terrorists first, soldiers second, giving scant thought to the exam question about what Custer should have done at the Little Big Horn, and looking forward instead to the first time when they will be obliged to grit their teeth and torture one or more ethnically-named terrorists in order to find - or locate, as the Americans say - the microbe bomb that will go off in 24 hours.

Even more disturbing than the possibility that officer cadets might be thinking like this is that the men they command may be thinking like this...
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Nexxo · 3 Apr 2007

And for those skim-readers who can't be asked to click the link...

The real problem is with people who want to be torturers.

These include nearly all terrorists, but they also include, unless we're careful, far too many people in the home team. Abu Ghraib under the Americans would have been regarded as paradise by anyone who was in the same place under Saddam Hussein, but it has to be faced that the soldiers who were subsequently convicted of abuse weren't alone in their dumb eagerness to turn up for work there. There is always a supply of sadists in any army. The thing to avoid is creating the demand. Instructive, then, that West Point doesn't want the maniacs to be encouraged.

When democratic states favour torture, either directly by themselves or indirectly by rendition - a fancy word for handing over people you suspect of loathing you to people you know you loathe - it not only destroys the credibility of any claim you might have had to be defending a value, it also encourages the formation of a gung-ho, pseudo-realist, would-be-warrior caste that thinks that ruthless is not just permitted, but desirable, in order to rule by fear. But rule by fear works only if it's total.

In the old Soviet Union, a regime that did rule by fear right to the end, there would have been no question of the Red Army politely asking a Moscow television station to tone down its 24-part show about Janko Baurovitch torturing the captured CIA agent in order to locate the nerve gas capsule buried under Red Square.

The state would simply have declared its will. The US, despite what its countless enemies think, is not a state that can simply declare its will, which is the very reason why we aren't wasting our time when we vocalise our scorn after Vice President Dick Cheney's wife plays hostess to the creators of 24 as if they were a school of philosophers.
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West Point worries over '24'

cpemma Ecky thump

Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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West Point worries over '24'

cpemma Ecky thump

Nexxo * Prefab Sprout – The King of Rock 'n' Roll

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