Posted by
Defend America on Monday, January 25, 2010 7:17:37 AM
Meet the Real Jack Bauers
In Courting Disaster, the real CIA interrogators explain why their methods bear no resemblance to what you see on Fox’s 24.
By Marc A. Thiessen
This week saw the premiere of a new season of 24,
with CTU agent Jack Bauer preparing to leave the world of
counterterrorism for a quiet life as a grandfather in Los Angeles. But
he is pulled back into the fight to stop the attempted assassination of
a Middle Eastern leader in New York. As he questions an informant, he
thrusts a gun into the man’s neck but then pulls back, telling him,
“You’re lucky I’m retired.” In another time, the man would have
suffered far worse.
The public view of interrogations had
been shaped by the fictional Bauer, who captures a terrorist and
proceeds to torture him — holding down his head in a bathtub full of
water, using a Taser to shock him, lopping off his fingers with a cigar
cutter — while screaming questions until the terrorist finally breaks
and gives up the location of the nuclear bomb that is about to go off.
For some critics of U.S. interrogation policy, this is not fiction, but a depiction of reality. In
Newsweek,
Dahlia Lithwick has written that “high-ranking lawyers in the Bush
administration erected an entire torture policy around the fictional
edifice of Jack Bauer.” And Philippe Sands, author of the book
Torture Team,
has written that the show has been the “midwife” for torture’s “actual
use on real, living human beings.” None of this is true.
Unlike these critics, I have had the chance to actually meet the
real
Jack Bauers — the CIA officials who questioned Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
and other senior terrorist leaders and got them to reveal their plans
for new terrorist attacks. They explained to my why their approach has
nothing in common with the methods used by Bauer on the fictional
24.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NTYyYTlhMzg5OWY1OThlMDA0ZjIxNmMzNjg2N2E1NWU=&w=MA==