The Jack Bauer Power Hour and Torture

There's quite a fuss about the McCain torture bill going round the web right now, with hawks like Andrew Sullivan and Ramesh Ponnuru arguing for its passage and National Review arguing against it. The problem is that, like most potent legislative dilemmas, it's not just a matter of policy, but of politics.

National Review's case is, intellectually, I think, the right one. There's no reason to tack on additional regulation banning torture. It's already illegal, and codifiying more laws and restrictions on prisoner treatment can only serve to make information gathering more lugubrious and muddle the boundaries further. Legislative directives, as much as they might be pored over by a raft of law-degree holding D.C.ers, are rarely the pictures of clarity, and there's an intrinsic cost in time and delineation whenever you add more law to the books. We're swimming in laws in this country as it is; we need fewer regulations, not more.

Further, there's what I'll call the "24 Exception," in which an agent must extract time-sensitive information pertaining to an imminent attack. Audiences increasingly love Jack Bauer for his hardcore excursions into torture, but we're a little more squeamish about its real-life counterpart. But I think you'll find few who will argue that there aren't exceptions (or hypothetically could be) in which any and all measures should taken to produce information from a detainee. When lives are on the line, we want a man who's willing to electrocute his girlfriend's estranged husband for information (hey--they're separated).

But as Ross and Ramesh point out, there's also a strong need for good PR, and the way to approach this bill is not to think of it so much as a ball and chain for our field agents and instead consider it symbolic public statement of our beliefs about prisoner treatment. As a general rule, the U.S. ought to be the world leader in detainee treatment, and our legislation ought to remind a somewhat understandably riled world that this is the case. These rules, like any rules, can be bent or broken when the need is there, but that's not the public face we want to put on. Let President Palmer do the talking; Jack Bauer can do the dirty work, and if he fails, we can always send him on the lam for season 5.