Arts & Culture
Rough justice
Published 19 March 2007
The US military has accused the television series 24 of promoting torture. The programme's star, Kiefer Sutherland, tells Stephen Armstrong that the army should concentrate on cleaning up its own act
Kiefer Sutherland walks into the room, sits down at a wooden table covered in papers and bottles, and then notices a tape recorder ready to roll right in front of him. He throws up his hands in mock horror. "It's a deposition!" he exclaims. "I'd like to start by saying I didn't do it . . ."
Even his publicist laughs. Sutherland has spent a large chunk of his 40-year life flirting with danger - two failed marriages, his luckless 1991 engagement to Julia Roberts, drunken run-ins with Christmas trees, his (former) tendency to get into bar fights, and that period in the Nineties, just before landing the lead role in the acclaimed television series 24, when he was churning out very bad films indeed. Now, however, he is facing trouble from an organisation with tendencies more aggressive than even he is used to: the United States army.
Hard though it might be to believe, the US military has appealed to the producers of 24, in which Sutherland stars as the maverick spook Jack Bauer, to tone down the programme's frequent torture scenes, because of "the impact they are having on troops in the field and America's reputation abroad". On the day we meet, there are reports in the US press that Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan has visited the show's set to plead with the producers to cut back on such scenes. "I'd like them to stop," Finnegan said. "They should do a show where torture backfires. The kids see it and say, 'If torture is wrong, what about 24?' The disturbing thing is that although torture may cause Jack Bauer some angst, it is always the patriotic thing to do."
When Sutherland hears this story, he snorts out a rapidly choked-off laugh. "The US army are worried about the sequences in our show?" he sighs. "They should be a lot more worried about their behaviour in Abu Ghraib than they should about our television show. What happened in Abu Ghraib was criminal. As a nation, we're trying to tell people that democracy and freedom are the way to go, and then we go and behave like that. Inexcusable. But the army complaining? That's ludicrous."
To be fair, the torture scenes in 24 have become increasingly brutal over the six seasons that the show has so far run. Bauer's recent adventures have included decapitating a paedophile and presenting his head in a holdall as a goodwill gesture to a terrorist cell he was trying to infiltrate, and suffocating his own brother with a plastic bag. The baddies, of course, have been just as vicious, taking a power drill to the shoulder of Bauer's computer whizz chum Morris O'Brian (played by Carlo Rota) in a successful attempt to nab a device used to arm nuclear bombs.
In this way, the show has created an unusual alliance between the Pentagon and human-rights charities such as Human Rights First, a non-profit organisation fighting for the end of torture. David Danzig, a campaign manager for the group, says that since the 11 September 2001 attacks, the incidence of torture in TV shows has soared. In 2000 there were 42 scenes of torture on prime-time US television; in 2003 there were 228. "I think there is no question [that it is having an effect]," Danzig argues. "We have spoken to soldiers with experience in Iraq who say, for young soldiers, there is a direct relationship between what they are doing in their jobs and what they see on TV . . . It's the same abroad. The image of the United States and its military [being involved in torture] is being affirmed."
What is surprising is that it has taken six years for this issue to emerge. Since the show launched in 2001 - on Fox in the US and BBC2 in the UK - it has used a real-time ticking clock device to raise tension as Sutherland's Counter-Terrorist Unit agent unravels conspiracies to set off nuclear bombs or assassinate presidents. Along the way he has to make snap decisions when choosing between liberty and security. A suspect can be accorded due process or tortured in pursuit of a lead. Bauer almost always chooses violence.
Sutherland himself, he is keen to make clear, is firmly opposed to torture. "You torture someone and they'll basically tell you exactly what you want to hear, whether it's true or not, if you put them in enough pain," he says. "Within the context of our show, which is a fantastical show to begin with, the torture is a dramatic device to show you how desperate a situation is."
Does he not see a link to real life? "The fact is, we are a television show and we use some of the torture sequences as a dramatic device to heighten tension." He spreads his hands out on the table in front of him. "It is simply that. We are not saying this is the way the world should be. There are so many things we do that require an absolute suspension of disbelief in this conceit of the 24-hour day. To say that I support everything Jack Bauer does would be to say that I support the suspension of due process, which is ridiculous. 24 is absolutely not a justification for torture. What we're interested in is the fact that it has become a debate on a very public level."
Certainly, Sutherland is no Jack Bauer. The son of the Canadian actors Donald Sutherland and Shirley Douglas, he was born into a political family as the Sixties reached their radical peak. His mother was particularly active, raising cash for the Black Power movement through her fundraising group Friends of the Black Panthers. This cost her her US work permit and she headed back to Canada in 1977, where Kiefer was partly raised by her father, Tommy Douglas, head of Canada's first socialist government (in Saskatche wan province) and founder of its free healthcare.
"When people talk about me living up to my dad, it's about acting, really," says Sutherland. "With my grandfather, that's another thing. He was one of those rare people who not only had the passion and conviction to change things for the better but could also take people with him. There are days I can feel him smiling down at me, saying, 'You're doing all right.' There are other days I can hear him saying, 'Boy, that was bad.'"
With such an upbringing, Sutherland tends to get hard-right bloggers frothing at the mouth when he gives interviews. The Republican trolls were especially incensed by a chat on PBS's Charlie Rose Show in January in which the actor said he leans "towards socialist politics".
"To a large degree [my politics] are private, but I believe that we have a responsibility to take care of each other, so when you can talk about social ised healthcare, absolutely, that's a no-brainer," he explains. "Free universities: absolutely, that's a no-brainer for me. So, in the definition, I guess those are leaning towards socialist politics. To me it's common sense. And I do believe the wealthy have a responsibility to the less fortunate. Some people call that communism. I disagree. Again, it's common sense. But I would have to say that my politics would be leaning towards the left."
"How's that for a kick in the head?" moaned Noel Sheppard on NewsBusters (motto: "Exposing and Combating Liberal Media Bias"), an online arm of the Media Research Centre, a conservative monitoring group. The right had assumed that Jack Bauer was "one of us". Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney are fans and, on the day after the arrest of seven terrorism suspects in Miami last June, the hapless secretary for homeland security, Michael Chertoff, tried to claim the show as an instructive parallel at a meeting with the right-wing Heritage Foundation.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Sutherland doesn't see things the same way. "You've got everyone from Newt Gingrich and John McCain on the right to Barbra Streisand and the Clintons on the left talking about the benefits of this show," he argues. "What I get from that is that it's balanced. That's down to our writers. We have Howard Gordon on the left and Joel Surnow on the right and I do think our balance can be literally attributed to them being almost diametrically opposed."
Three days after our meeting, Sutherland agrees to visit cadets at the West Point military academy to discuss why it is wrong to torture prisoners. As an actor, he gives a great interview - charming, funny and bright. But if he is the person the army means to turn to in the hope of preventing another Abu Ghraib, no disrespect, Kiefer, but we're all in trouble.
The sixth series of 24 is on Sky 1 on Sundays (9pm)
Torture on TV
Research by Kylie Walker
Alias
Although 24 has shown more torture than any other programme, the pressure group Human Rights First has picked out others for criticism. Alias is a spy thriller starring Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow (left), a CIA agent. Although Bristow keeps her cool, other agents regularly engage in torture to extract information. Scenes have included one agent jabbing a needle into a woman's neck and threatening to inject her with lethal chemicals unless she talks.
Law and Order
Human Rights First notes that in this new generation of shows, both "goodies"and "baddies" use torture. In NBC's crime drama Law and Order, detectives regularly torture suspects in order to obtain life-saving information quickly. One notable example was Detective Joe Fontana, played by Dennis Farina, threatening to drown a kidnapper by repeatedly dunking his head in a toilet bowl. The tactic worked: the kidnapper cracked and told Fontana where he had hidden his victim, a little girl.
Lost
The award-winning desert island drama Lost has also featured graphic scenes of torture. The Gulf war veteran and former torturer Sayid Jarrah, played by Naveen Andrews, often uses his skills on behalf of his fellow castaways. In one scene he loses control while interrogating a man and beats him up. On another occasion he threatens to remove another character's eyes with a knife (pictured left).
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