West Point general asks ’24′ to stop promoting torture
“We’ve had all of these torture experts come by recently, and they say, ‘You don’t realize how many people are affected by this. Be careful.’ They say torture doesn’t work. But I don’t believe that.” –Joel Surnow, producer of 24
This past November, U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, flew to Southern California to meet with the creative team behind “24.†Finnegan, who was accompanied by three of the most experienced military and F.B.I. interrogators in the country, arrived on the set as the crew was filming. At first, Finnegan—wearing an immaculate Army uniform, his chest covered in ribbons and medals—aroused confusion: he was taken for an actor and was asked by someone what time his “call†was.
In fact, Finnegan and the others had come to voice their concern that the show’s central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. “I’d like them to stop,†Finnegan said of the show’s producers. “They should do a show where torture backfires.â€
Go to original by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker
Yeah, we need to get a tribunal going in the Hague to take Surnow to task for the murder and torture he’s validated through his cliffhanger TV drama about “terror”.
But they’d have to get in line behind Dick Wolf, Leni Reifenstahl and the producers of Fox’s “Cops” who similarly pumped out biased propaganda that gave a cover for bad things through the magic of cimema.
Maybe we have British Victorian penny novelists for the fixation with crime stories and police procedurals, of which “24″ is a sort, I guess. Have you ever wondered what an alien might think of our fixations about stories concerning murder and voilence in general.