Alfred W. McCoy, The Progressive, October 2006
Ask not for whom the bomb ticks, Mr. and Ms. America. Right now, across Los Angeles, timers on dozens of toxic nerve-gas canisters are set to detonate in just hours and send some two million Americans to their deaths in writhing agony.
But take hope. We have one chance, just one, to avert this atrocity and save the lives of millions. Agent Jack Bauer of the Counter Terrorist Unit has his hunting knife poised over the eye of a trembling traitor who may know the identity of those who set these bombs. As a clock ticks menacingly and the camera focuses on knife point poised to plunge into eyeball, the traitor breaks and identifies the Muslim terrorists, giving Agent Bauer the lead he needs to crack this case wide open.
As happens with mind-numbing regularity every week on Fox Television’s hit show 24, torture has once again worked to save us all from the terror of a ticking bomb, affirming for millions of loyal viewers that torture is a necessary weapon in George Bush’s war on terror.
“Major success from limited, surgical torture is a fable, a fiction. . . . As we slide down the slippery slope to torture in general, we should also realize that there is a chasm at the bottom called extrajudicial execution.”
Just days before the fifth anniversary of 9/11, President Bush himself appeared live from the East Room before an audience of handpicked 9/11 families for a dramatic announcement that mimed, with eerie precision, the ticking-bomb logic of 24, which is wildly popular among Washington’s neoconservatives. With clipped, secret-agent diction reminiscent of the show’s Emmy Award-winning star, Kiefer Sutherland, Bush said he was transferring fourteen top Al Qaeda captives, including the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, from long-secret CIA prisons to Guantánamo Bay. At once both repudiating and legitimating past abuses, Bush denied that he had ever authorized “torture.” Simultaneously, he defended the CIA’s effort to coerce “vital information” from these “dangerous” captives with what the President called an “alternative set of procedures”—a euphemism transparent to any viewer of 24.