24 aired 2 months after 9/11
Fox's counterterrorism show 24, which prominently features torture, aired its first episode just two months after the September 11 attacks.
Where this was said
Post-9/11: 24, Zero Dark Thirty, and Torture Normalization
At 24:23 · chapter starts 24:10
After 9/11, the CIA allegedly saw an opportunity. A traumatized American public craving vengeance might be receptive to accepting harsh interrogation tactics — if they were made to seem necessary and effective [1] — Carter Roy "Fox's 24 aired two months after 9/11 and glorified torture as a necessary counterterrorism tool. Zero Dark Thirty — with unprecedented CIA …" 24:10 . Enter Jack Bauer, the hero of Fox's 24, which premiered just two months after the attacks and featured torture as a routine and effective counterterrorism tool. By 2005, the Bush administration's actual post-9/11 torture program had been publicly revealed. The hosts wonder: did 24 make Americans less surprised, and less outraged, by that news? Then came Zero Dark Thirty, which received extraordinary CIA cooperation — including access to the floor plan of CIA headquarters in Langley — and depicted waterboarding as instrumental in locating Osama bin Laden, despite torture not being officially used in the real operation. By some accounts, roughly a third of the film's runtime is a single extended torture sequence. The hosts observe that Homer Simpson torturing someone would have been played for laughs — perhaps the most effective kind of normalization of all.
24 and Zero Dark Thirty: CIA Torture Propaganda?
Fox's 24 aired two months after 9/11 and glorified torture as a necessary counterterrorism tool. Zero Dark Thirty — with unprecedented CIA access including floor plans of Langley — depicted torture as central to capturing Bin Laden, even though it officially wasn't. If the CIA wanted torture normalized, both productions did that job.
Zero Dark Thirty: 1/3 of film is torture
According to some accounts, approximately one third of Zero Dark Thirty's runtime depicts a terrorist being tortured and waterboarded.
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