The GOP should take a lesson from this guy. (Source: Wikimedia)
The legendary television hero Jack Bauer approaches a house in the middle of a random neighborhood in Los Angeles. It looks like any other in this middle-class suburban area. But it wasn’t supposed to be this way. He was supposed to be either retired or dead by now. But when the last possible remaining relative of his who had not yet been taken hostage by terrorists got taken hostage by terrorists, he was forced to spring into action one final time. The past twenty-four hours—exactly how long, by random coincidence, it has taken Jack Bauer to personally solve every other major terrorist threat to the United States over the past seven years—have been filled with no sleep, but have contained a gruesome amount of fighting, shooting, running, intense cell phone conversations with superiors of dubious allegiance, and whatever else it is that Jack Bauer does over the course of his incredibly frequent heroic escapades.
But this is it. He has found the bombmaker/mastermind/corrupt counterterrorism agent who was supposed to be his best friend. He breaks down the door and prepares for his final confrontation. After a brief melee, Bauer subdues his adversary and asks him repeatedly where the thing is that he has been seeking for the past couple of dozen hours. And after not too long, the detainee relents and tells him what he needs to know. "Wait," says Jack. :This isn’t going to be that easy. Alberto Gonzales and Rick Santorum have both told me that the type of information I want can only be gained a certain way, so what you just said can’t be true. I’m going to have to interrogate you. In an enhanced fashion."
Even in that hyper-dramatic fictional world, however, such a conversation just wouldn’t happen. It’s not the torture that Jack Bauer is interested in, after all—it’s the information.
The fantasy ticking time-bomb scenarios featured in the hit television show 24, featuring fictional counterterrorism super-agent Jack Bauer, were used all too frequently by conservative ideologues to justify the Bush torture regime of extraordinary rendition, a secret transnational network of black prison sites, waterboarding, and the affixing of testicular electrodes to innocent cab drivers in occupied countries. Torture, they argued, may certainly be an evil; something we could wish didn’t have to happen, and something very distant from the ultimate expression of our nation’s values; but in a post-9/11 world, it was a necessary evil because could never be too careful, and it was far better to be safe than sorry. Jack Bauer, they contended, may not actively want to torture people; but in a choice between torturing one evil man and thousands of innocent people losing their lives, the torture of one was far preferable.
By this argument, the news from the Obama administration—corroborated by leading Republicans with significant experience in national defense such as John McCain and Donald Rumsfeld—that waterboarding or other forms of torture were not necessary to secure the information that led to the location of Osama bin Laden, would seem like the most welcome news at all. The fact that the most important target in the struggle against international terrorism was acquired through traditional, unenhanced interrogation vindicates those who had always opposed torture as not only illegal and immoral, but also as ineffective. But this news should have been equally as welcome to those who had supported the use of torture in interrogations; after all; if torture really is a compromise of our values and we should use it only when absolutely necessary, it should still come as a welcome relief to know that we clearly don’t have to compromise those values nearly as often as we might have otherwise supposed to get the information we really need to keep ourselves safe.
Unfortunately for our country, however, there are still certain people desperately trying to rehabilitate the use of torture in the face of this welcome news. People who actively don’t want it to be true that the most useful piece of intelligence we’ve gotten was acquired through other means. People, in other words, who want torture to be necessary for no other reason than to justify the actions of the political party of the President who instituted the regime. People like Dick Cheney, who has no heartbeat either literal or figurative. People like Rick Santorum, who is so desperate to defend the use of torture that he is willing to claim that a man like Senator John McCain, who languished for half a decade in a Hanoi torture prison, “has no idea how enhanced interrogation works.” People, in short, who don’t share the same American values that the rest of us do.
Perhaps they should take a lesson from Jack Bauer. When the right thing is the thing that works, why wouldn’t you just do it?