Jack Bauer was getting a little testy.
It was a simple but vital mission: go to Afghanistan and find Osama bin Laden. His terrorist group, al Qaeda, had already attacked the United States once, and the suits in Washington were afraid that they were prepared to do so again. It was a strictly black ops gig, so far off the books it was practically illiterate, with plausible deniability all the way up the chain of command, including first pets.
The only problem was al Qaeda didn’t have a hierarchical structure. Torture one guy for information, and at most he’ll be able to give you the names of the three other members of his cell. Torture them and they’ll give up each other – not exactly useful information. More than once during this process, Bauer thought his unique talents for causing others to suffer in the name of national security were being squandered.
After several months came a breakthrough: the government decided that Osama bin Laden wasn’t as much of a threat as they had originally thought, and they invaded neighbouring Iraq. Bauer felt that he had been hung out to dry, and had a few dramatic moments where he railed against politicians who made decisions without knowing anything of the conditions on the ground. His internal anguish was palpable. Reluctantly, Bauer slipped into Iraq and offered his services to the army.
Torturing people in a war zone is not like torturing people in civilian life (except, perhaps, for East LA, but Bauer put that out of his mind because it made him feel homesick). Oh, sure, the army pays lip service to niceties like the Geneva Conventions and other rules of international law, but, when you actually get “in country,” the only rule you follow is the rule of survival. In times of war, you practically have a licence to torture people, and where’s the challenge in that?
Then, after the war in Iraq had been “won” (36 hours after it had started), American soldiers started dying in hit and run attacks that were attributed to terrorists. The theory was that attacks on Americans were orchestrated by members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party, so Bauer, who was “volunteered” to help curb the nascent insurgency, tortured Ba’athists. Most of them seemed to know nothing beyond their own part in the killings; some were so well trained that no amount of torture was able to make them talk.
As the insurgency grew, the theories about who was behind it shifted. At first, it was thought that foreigners were crossing over Iraq’s porous borders in order to undermine American efforts at creating a democracy in the country. So, Bauer tortured Iranians, Saudi Arabians and the occasional Frenchman. He didn’t believe he would get any useful intel out of this last group, he just really enjoyed torturing the French.
After a time, the focus shifted once again: to Iraqi religious extremists. They may have been supported by outside forces (Iranian extremists were the most likely), but they were homegrown. So, Bauer started torturing Islamic extremists.
Only, it was around this time that he noticed that people who were being brought in for torture didn’t fit the profile. Old men who didn’t appear to be all that religious. Kids who thought it would be fun to slip past an American checkpoint. Over time, the profile seemed to disintegrate, leaving no pattern by which to determine why people were being brought in for torture. This was a problem because if you don’t know who you’re torturing, you don’t know what information you need to get out of them.
Jack Bauer was getting a little testy. And, wouldn’t you? He hadn’t slept for over 48 months. He barely ate. He never went to the bathroom – his bladder must be the size of Texas. And, the more suffering he inflicted on people (had he tortured 100, 1,000 or more? – after a while, you kind of lose track), the worse conditions seemed to get, not better.
He longed for the days when he was played on television by Keifer Sutherland. On television, the people you tortured were always guilty. They always had information that got you closer to stopping an imminent, devastating terrorist attack, and they always revealed it to you in enough time.
In the real world, this torture shit was complicated.