TV torture scenes torment activists

[RFKHumphreyObama]

TV torture scenes torment activists
Los Angeles
March 12 2007 -5:30PM

Desperate to get answers from a terrorism suspect who is refusing to talk, steely eyed US intelligence agent Jack Bauer bursts into an interrogation room and shoots the prisoner in the leg.

In an instant, the squirming, grimacing villain fesses up, revealing the target of an assassination plot.

On other occasions, our hero seeks to obtain crucial information from bad guys by suffocating them with a plastic bag, administering pain-inducing intravenous drugs or even cutting off a finger.

Welcome to an evening of television in post-September 11 America.

<snip>
Syracuse University media scholar Robert Thompson says such TV melodrama, while shocking to some, serves as a kind of wish fulfilment for the masses.

"If you can't be shown kicking the enemy's butt in real life, we then demand it in fiction. And that's what's so satisfying about 24. It's the Lone Ranger fantasy," he says.
<snip>

Most disturbing, according to some experts, is that such entertainment has inspired real-life American soldiers assigned to question prisoners without proper training, or under controversial new interrogation directives that critics say permit torture and disregard the Geneva Conventions.

During his time in Iraq, military interrogators were told "to be creative", says Tony Lagouranis, a veteran US Army interrogator who worked at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

"We got an open-ended interrogation rule of engagement saying you can basically do whatever the hell you want," Lagouranis says.

"And so, in the absence of training, because we weren't trained how to torture, we turned to what we saw on television."
http://www.theage.com.au/news/tv--radio/tv-torture-scenes-torment-activists/2007/03/12/1173548094708.html
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[HereSince1628]

1. Wow, plastic bag suffocation replaces the LR's silver bullets.

I'm not sure that even Leo Strauss would see this stretch of manachaeism as a worthy example of the fight of good against evil. When Stauss loved "Gunsmoke" it at least had face-to-face shoot outs.

[rocktivity]

2. Terrorism chic, I call it

It's all about weaving torture, humiliation, and degradation into the fabric of American life. Making it seem organic and justifiable supresses public sympathy and outrage--after all, they're the enemy. 24 is simply more obvious about it--what do you think Survivor, The Great Race, American Idol and their anscestor MTV's Real Life are REALLY about?

:headbang:
rocknation