Tramadol and depression. Ibuprophen and tramadol. Tramadol….

I mean y’all do know that amnesia is an exceedingly rare occurrence, right?

And that amnesiacs also forget basic skill such as cooking, driving, etc., right?

To be watchable for me a movie or show has to allow what is called ‘the suspension of disbelief’ and for me 24 so far misses the mark that it’s almost physically painful to watch.

24 is like ‘The A Team’ on steroids.

There’s a famous story about the police in Sweden have to constantly explain to their prisoners that they do not have Miranda rights (the suspects have seen too many US TV shows…)

General Finnegan is lost in a dream world. Does the average person in France watch FOX? Germany or Turkey? I don’t think so. (Even if they did in these countries, do we really care?)

“Jack Bauer is a bad influence on the troops and that the show may even be responsible for the mistreatment of some prisoners.” This is just another mindless robot statement. I can see our troops cheering for Jack but when they walk out that door to do their job they DO THEIR JOB!

We should fight our wars within the appropriate guidelines but some in America have never liked the military, don’t really support the troops, and will never support and REP mission so they attempt to neuter the troops. War is hell. People die. The more terror we strike into the hearts of this current enemy the better we are as they only understand power. If we only have 6 months to get the job done we need to get the Congress to do that congress work that they are supposed to do and keep their hands out of war operations.

24 is television. It is not to be taken seriously. TV is for relaxation and Jack fills the hour very nicely.

Network “prime time” TV remains a vast wasteland. Gratuitous scenes of abuse and torture will hardly change that.

The show basically shows torture as a an expedient and effective method to gain information. While I would agree that professional interrogators who interrogate full time would not be swayed by the show, soldiers in lower echelon’s might be. Often, at the point of capture, a detainee will be subject to tactical interrogation by personnel who aren’t as well trained as the primary interrogators are. These are sometimes called field interrogations. You can imagine a unit that has just lost soldiers to an IED and they capture the trigger man. The QRF is inbound and they need to know quickly if there are other IEDs. In the chaos of the battlefield where emotions are high and the risk is great, even well-trained soldiers can make mistakes in judgment and choose what they view as the best, most expedient method. Not saying that it happens frequently, but I’m sure it does. Our training has improved greatly at all levels since the war began when it became obvious we had a serious training deficiency service-wide.

So while I agree that the depictions in the show do not have a large effect, I think it’s equally silly to say they have no effect at all.

Secondly, I agree with Finnegan that portraying Jack so cool, calm, deliberate and methodical in his torture scenes validates it more in the mind of views. If he was a raving maniac then viewers, imo, would be more likely to see him as flawed and deranged. But jack often makes it look as if he’s “just doing a job” which gives a sense of normalcy, at least to me.

To the unprofessional, unschooled, or layman, I think TV depictions have a great effect. I can use television and movie depictions of intelligence capabilities as an example. I had people in the military, not intelligence professionals, but operators, who would ask me why his mission didn’t have 24 hour full-motion video satellite coverage. I had to give him a basic lesson in orbital physics and why it was impossible for a satellite to hover over California. I’ve had dozens of similar situations during my time in, and those were military people, who have a better understanding of intelligence support to military operations than an uninitiated civilian would. This effect carries over into blogs when I read people who have no idea what they’re talking about call the intelligence community incompetent because they don’t agent penetrations at every level in Iran or North Korea. It’s frustrating, but understandable since intelligence work on TV is always portrayed as just a simple matter of sending in a super agent, or pulling up the information on a computer screen.

So I have to admit I don’t watch the show anymore. As someone who knows what real intelligence work entails, it’s frustrating to watch your profession portrayed in such an unrealistic manner. Some of my friends who are former SEALS feel the same way about the awful Charlie Sheen movie “Navy SEALS” among others. Hollywood is getting better though, “Blackhawk down” while not perfect, was pretty good.