alt Hacker NewsOne example that's missing from the list is the TV series 24. A recurring plot point was that, yes, of course torture is bad and it's against the rules and we don't do it, etc etc, but it just so happens that here is such an exceptional, unprecedented, deeply urgent emergency situation where we need to have the information now or horrible things will happen, we need the hero who breaks the rules and goes on torturing anyway. [1]
Fast-forward a few years and you find there were in fact many such "heroes" in reality - in Abu Ghraib and in the Black Sites - and the situation weren't exceptional at all.
So accountability sinks can also be used as calculated ways to undermine your own ostensible ethical guardrails.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/jan/30/24-jack...
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I watched a season of Chicago PD, and noticed that they had a convenient "plot accelerator."
Whenever they got to a point, where the detectives and CSI would be painstakingly going through the evidence, sifting out clues, they'd throw the suspect into "the cage," and beat a confession out of them.
Well, it's the motive behind any atrocity committed during war, what's a few cracked eggs if there is a grand goal in mind. There are always people in places who feel like it's a historical duty to carry out those plans. And the war crimes stay in the past and get forgotten but nobody can deny the new reality on the ground. You can ethnically cleanse an area and in a 100 years that becomes barely a historical footnote and a new reality emerges and nobody can dispute that the area is occupied by a nation that claims rights based on self determination. Same for settler colonialism, they're not invading, just changing the actual conditions as a precursor to claiming political legitimacy.
What’s also interesting is that the tortured always turn out to be the bad guys. It never happens that he mistakenly tortured a good guy.
Convictions aren't convictions if you abandon them when it's hard. It's just cosplay
Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" comes to mind here.
Wasn't 24 cited by Cheney when he was defending USA-as-torturer ?
One of the things that strikes me about 24 is that it started running about 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a debate about running it or edits, but in retrospect it does seem like the timing worked and fit with the public mood of the time. What would be interesting is how 9/11 and following real life events influenced the show's writing in later series.
i see similarity too, but you dont explain why those people feels the urge to act like they did. why both protagonists, be it terrorist or counter, has some truth in their words; yet here they are, acting out of their minds, yet the world never was at stake to justify to let go like they did... to say that this due to an "accountability sink" is an euphemism, a theoretical concept that does not engage the internal structures.
There is no connection between Ab Ghraib and 24, a fictional TV series. If you think this stuff didn't happen before 24 then I'd like some proof. TV reflects reality (or a very stretched version of it), not the other way around, and 24 also wasn't the first version of such a thing. It's just that Abu G they used people who were young and not professionals so it leaked. It has probably been happening as long as the USA has had police forces like the CIA, military intelligence, and even cops.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine introduced Section 31, an organisation which regularly acted in the way you describe the characters from 24. They operated outside official channels and used questionable methods to do whatever was necessary “for the good of the Federation”. The character of Odo criticised it well:
> Interesting, isn’t it? The Federation claims to abhor Section 31’s tactics, but when they need the dirty work done they look the other way. It’s a tidy little arrangement, wouldn’t you say?
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Section_31