I have a family member who was hooked on the TV show "24" which featured torture.
I think that it is quite possible that there is some purposeful desensitization going on.
I think that it is quite possible that there is some purposeful desensitization going on.
I was thinking more about how there were a whole stack of movies exploring different aspects of torture in great detail, typically with unpleasant dilemmas, eg the Saw franchise, Hostel etc. etc.. Now I don't think these are exclusively a response to American policy either - the opst-2000 cultural context also included things like Al-Qaeda terrorists decapitating Daniel Pearl and uploading the videos to Youtube and so forth.
[1] You see it a lot in crime dramas from the 1980's, where things like the 4th amendment are portrayed as just letting criminals off on "technicalities."
The long history suggests that the shows and movies are a symptom of cultural attitudes, rather than a cause. For example, consider all the media in the 1980's portraying criminal procedural protections as "technicalities." I think it was in response to the fact that, after 1960, crime per capita tripled before incarceration per capita started going up. As I said about 24--in the aftermath of 9/11, the torture-fest was just capitalizing on the anger people felt. On my college campus in 2002 there was a lot of talk about nuking the middle east and things like that, which is quite contrary to what the government was saying.
Do you remember post 9-11 America? People were angry and afraid.
Jack Bauer tortured because America wanted him too.
There's something to be said for the post-9/11 zeitgeist that it gonna take us a really, really long time to get over. We see it in super hero movies (if I have to watch Manhattan get pulverized one more time...) and in a more evolved and complex form with Homeland. I think it'll be years before we come to terms with how we've responded as a society and with what we've done.
[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9876686
1) The ridiculous urgency of it, where they're running against the clock to "stop the bomb" or something like that. These kinds of scenarios are highly unlikely in real life, IMHO.
2) That Jack Bauer always got away with all the things he did. AFAIK, he did not spend even a single second inside a US prison (although he did come pretty close a few times).
I always looked at the show as fiction (like a superhero show), not something to be emulated in real life. I really hope most of its viewers looked at it the same way.
Imagine you are the director of such a show that is about some hero that prevents terrorism. What would you make that hero do to prevent a second 9/11 to capture the audience.
Edit: What I can imagine is that 24 inspired some US officials.
That's just the last straw for me. I would never have someone in my life, family or not, who would think raping people is acceptable. This is even worse. Even our enemies shouldn't be raped/tortured.
On the other hand, torture isn't something that people do because they feel they have to, but rather because they can. Since all the accumulated evidence to points to it being a poor way to to gather intelligence information, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that it's just way of being vindictive or sadistic instead, something that we find deplorable in other contexts. I think it's considered deplorable because such feelings are quite common but the majority of us make the effort not to act upon them.
the human race so far narrowed it down to 2 possibilities - judicial proceedings or war following the rules of Geneva Conventions. Every other form of violence is a crime, with torture and killings being the crimes against humanity, prosecutable by any government and without statute of limitations.