 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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