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US interrogators in Iraq may be taking cues from TV

Demanding information, Jack Bauer faces a terrified man tied to a chair in front of him. Through a window over Bauer's shoulder, the man sees his two children bound and gagged.

Tell me where the bomb is, Bauer orders, or we'll kill your family. Silence. The prisoner watches as a thug kicks down the chair his son is tied to and fires a gun at point-blank range. He screams but still doesn't relent -- until the gun is pointed at his second son. Having gotten what he needed, Bauer whispers that the execution was staged.

The scene from the TV show 24 is haunting, but hardly unusual. The advocacy group Human Rights First says there has been a startling increase in the number of torture scenes depicted on prime-time TV in the post-2001 world.

Even more chilling, there are indications that real-life US interrogators in Iraq are taking cues from what they see on TV, said Jill Savitt, the group's director of public programs.

Human Rights First recently brought a West Point commander and retired military interrogators to Hollywood for meetings with producers of 24 and ABC's Lost to talk about their concerns about life imitating art.

One man in the meeting was Tony Lagouranis, a former US Army specialist who questioned prisoners in Baghdad's infamous Abu Ghraib prison and several other facilities around Iraq. He said he saw instances of mock executions like that in 24. Once, some fellow interrogators asked an Iraqi translator to pretend he was being tortured to strike fear in a prisoner, after they had just watched a similar scene on a DVD.

Television is hardly the only factor at play; Lagouranis said many US interrogators are young, receive little training and are pressured by commanders to extract information from prisoners as quickly as they can.

But it's enough of a concern that one professor at a military academy told Savitt that Jack Bauer represented one of his biggest training challenges.

Retired US Army Colonel Stu Herrington, who learned military interrogation techniques in Vietnam and is an expert asked by the Army to consult on conditions at Guantanimo Bay, said that if Bauer worked for him, he'd be headed for a court-martial.

Prior to 2001, the few torture scenes on prime-time TV usually had the shows' villains as the instigators, Savitt said. In both 1996 and 1997, there were no prime-time TV scenes containing torture, according to the Parents Television Council, which keeps a programming database. In 2003, there were 228 such scenes, the PTC said. The count was over 100 in both 2004 and 2005.

They found examples on Alias, The Wire, Law & Order, The Shield -- even Star Trek: Voyager.

Human Rights First's ultimate desire is to drive home the idea that torture by Americans should never be tolerated.
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