Jack Bauer's 'Need for Speed' and the Ticking Time Bomb's Rhetorical Throw-weight

• In Event: Responding to a Legacy of Torture: Reconciliation, Reform and Retribution in Obama's First Year

Abstract

Can Barack Obama deliver on his promise to make a clean break from controversial Bush administration "war on terror" policies and practices? Do war crimes investigations offer a politically viable option for punctuating such a break? Answers to these questions depend partly on political will, but also on the institutional and cultural contexts defining this particular moment in history. For example, the Obama impetus for more humane interrogation methods collides with institutional inertia borne from recent trends in U.S. military thinking and doctrine. Similarly, any attempt to hold Bush administration officials accountable for war crimes would likely encounter energetic pushback in a culture that celebrates Jack Bauer, renegade protagonist of the Fox Television series 24. Part one of this paper explores how the U.S. military's emphasis on decision-making decentralization and "full spectrum" dominance in speed, time and information has roots in nonlinear science such as chaos theory. Such thinking feeds a prevalent "need for speed" among military planners, who tend to sense that with time constantly running out, extraordinary measures such as use of preventive force are scientifically justified. Because this orientation generates institutional impetus for decentralized actors to create loopholes for rogue actions (e.g. "trickle-up" torture), top-down policy change seeking to constrain such measures may have only limited effectiveness. Part two extends this analysis by taking an astonishing culture-military nexus as a point of departure. News reports indicate that the television series 24 actually influenced Guantanamo interrogation "brainstorming meetings" and complicated West Point training on Geneva Convention protections, with skeptical cadets asking instructors, "If torture is wrong, what about 24?" In public spheres, Jack Bauer has evolved into a powerful and complex condensation symbol, metonymically standing in for the "ticking time bomb" justification for torture, widespread public acceptance for that justification, and moral bankruptcy of those who challenge harsh interrogation measures undertaken in the name of national security. A more fine-grained understanding of 24's influence on military training and Jack Bauer's polyvalent potency as a cultural condensation symbol promises to elucidate constraints on the Obama administration's transcendent aspirations.

Authors

• Sean Lawson, University of Utah

• Gordon Mitchell, Univ of Pittsburgh