 It's an article of faith on the right--not just the fanboys, but the ones who actually ran the Bush "War on Terror"--that way to fight to terrorism is to be learned from the TV show 24, as Dahlia Lithwick writes at Newsweek. Only problem is, experts are virtually unanimous: they're utterly wrong. Torture doesn't work to extract information quickly. In fact, it doesn't work to extract reliable information at all. Dahlia gets into all that in her Newsweek piece, as well as the rather pointed observation that Bauer knows what he's doing is illegal, and expects to pay a price for it:
that is the real source of his heroism-to the extent one finds torture heroic. He makes a moral choice at odds with the prevailing system, and accepts the consequences of the system's judgment.
All in all, she does a very good job of hitting the high notes in the crazy world of taking "24" as blue-print for fighting terror.
But there is another TV show that actually does provide some valuable insight into combating terrorism, the CBS show about FBI profilers, Criminal Minds. The premise of profiling is quite simple: to catch a criminal, you have to know how to think like a criminal. And not just any criminal, but the particular criminal that committed the particular crime you're trying to solve. Profilers are most famous for their work with serial killers, but profiling can be applied to a much wider range of crimes, including those that are political. A key insight is that no matter how "crazy" the criminal's thinking may seem, it all makes sense to them, and if you can understand what that sense is, then you are well more than halfway there to solving the crime.
There's a deep irony here: On the one hand, conservatives are utterly horrified at the very thought of trying to understand the terrorists who attacked us. So horrified, they can't even focus on what it means. At one point, Karl Rove mocked liberals, saying, "liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," On the other hand, conservatives are actually very close to the terrorists how they think--brothers under the skin, one might say: tribalist, ethnocentric, religious, fundamentalist, self-righteous, prone to violence and scornful of compromise or even dialogue. They are peas in a pod. No wonder conservatives don't want to understand the terrorists--they'd have to admit they're one and the same!
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I said above that:
A key insight is that no matter how "crazy" the criminal's thinking may seem, it all makes sense to them, and if you can understand what that sense is, then you are well more than halfway there to solving the crime.
But it's not just that there's a logic to the serial pattern criminal's behavior, be they a serial killer, arsonist or whatever. More often than not, there's a morality to it. A sick and twisted morality, to be sure, but a morality, nonetheless. Understand the warped moral vision, and you understand the fundamental logic--they are one and the same. And this is another aspect of the profiler's art that drives conservatives crazy, since they always presume that (a) they alone are truly moral, and (b) "truly moral" means "truly good."
The idea of a twisted morality that could lead people who deeply believe in their cause to do monstrously horrible things--that idea is, of necessity, unthinkable to conservatives. And, of course, much like Richard Clarke's warnings about al Qaeda, the "unthinkable" is the key to a successful anti-terrorism policy.
One feature of Criminal Minds is that it explores the risks, the dangers involved in the characters getting close too serial killers--both inside their heads and physically close as well, but the former far more profoundly than the latter. Indeed, one profiler (one of my favorite characters, alas!) ended up crossing the line, and killing an "unsub" in cold blood. ("Unsub" = "unknown subject", the original designation of the person they're hunting, which stays in use, even after their identity is known) Another team member was falsely accused of being a serial killer in another episode--and it turned out that he did have a very dark secret, though not one of his making or volition. A third member was captured and repeatedly drugged by a serial killer, leading to a prolonged battle with addiction and fears about his own capacity for evil, the tenuousness of his own self-control.
Well, you get the picture. Getting into killers heads is the very heart of their jobs, and there's a price to paid for it. It makes for an inherently murky moral universe... on one level, and the exact opposite on another. After all, they are saving lives--the exact opposite of the unsubs they hunt. And the more similar their thinking may become, the most important it is that they be reminded of this. On team member may start to lose faith in their own humanity, another will remind them. Of course, the very fact that reminding is necessary speaks to the greater complexity that there are two levels. And this is what keeps them honest. They live a contradiction, and acknowledging it at one level resolves it at another.
This is what it takes to actually fight terrorism effectively, as well. We have to be able to think like terrorists, to enter their mindset, understand their logic--and we can only do that by letting go of our own logic, for however brief a time. This is not just true for those prosecuting the war--which, it should be obvious, should not actually be a war--but for all Americans as a whole.
We must be able to imagine ourselves being driven to committing terrorist acts like the ones that have been perpetrated against us. Because, in part, we have already done this. We have bombed civilians. Tortured innocents. Done everything we might accuse al Qaeda of doing. That's precisely what terrorists intend--it's the whole point of terrorism to destroy the legitimacy of an enemy that can never be defeated directly by getting them to destroy it themselves.
It's only by recognizing that capacity for evil in ourselves that we will ever have the slightest chance of success in the struggle against becoming the evil we fight. |
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