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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Could terrorists blow us up with the "nuclear football"? Do jihadi cells party in clubs and recruit infidels? Could Jack Bauer legally kidnap and torture you? What the paranoid hit show gets wrong -- and what it gets right.
May 16, 2005 | This season of "24" was inevitable. Along with his colleagues at the fictional Counterterrorist Unit (CTU), Jack Bauer, the unrelenting terrorism fighter played to crusading perfection by Kiefer Sutherland, has already faced plots to assassinate politicians, explode suitcase nukes, and launch massive bio-attacks. The CTU has taken out vengeful Serbs, ruthless drug lords and powerful oil interests seeking to manipulate the United States into launching a war in the Middle East. For your freedom, Jack Bauer even got himself addicted to heroin. But that was all foreplay. This year, for the first time, Bauer went up against the real deal: a vast and dedicated network of Islamic terrorists, including domestic sleeper cells, dead set on launching a multi-wave nuclear assault against the U.S. homeland.
Pitting Jack against the jihadists -- for real this time, not like the tease of Season 2 -- gives "24" the story arc it's been crying out for since its November 2001 debut. The secretary of defense is kidnapped, outfitted in a Guantánamo-style orange jumpsuit, and marched into a terrorist show trial broadcast live over the Internet. Defense contractors who have sold weapons to enemies of the United States deploy a team of mercenaries to kill government agents. Nuclear reactors remotely controlled by the terrorists melt down in the midst of densely populated areas. The only force able to protect America from total destruction, naturally, is CTU.
CTU's ridiculously capable agents fish through oceans of information to discover imminent attacks, lurk behind every security camera on every street corner, and have a license to torture detainees if it means preventing a nuclear nightmare. Executive producer Howard Gordon has described "24" as catering to the public's post-9/11 "fear-based wish fulfillment" for protectors like Jack Bauer, who don't hesitate to go to extremes. That's one way of putting it. Another is that "24" is war-on-terror porn.
Don't tell that to Gordon's colleagues. For the people behind "24," the sheer fact that the show deals with jihadist terrorism during "Day Four," as this fourth season is known, demonstrates the show's gritty verisimilitude.
"For it to have any believability and resonance, we had to deal in the world we're living with, with the terrorists and the jihadists," co-creator Joel Surnow recently told the Washington Times.
But don't tell that to the show's legion of security-wonk fans. For many of them, it's precisely the absurdity of "24" that makes the show so irresistible. "That's what we love about it," notes "24" addict Juliette Kayyem, a former Justice Department official who directs Harvard University's national security program. "Nothing seems to make sense if you actually piece it together." Adds Roger Cressey, a former White House counterterrorism aide in the Clinton and Bush administrations who admits to TiVo-ing the last couple of episodes: "Although the real world doesn't offer anything nearly as fast, or as good or bad, it's entertaining as all hell."
It's not just the official-sounding gibberish (in one of the show's finest word salads, the CTU chief instructs her staff to "double-source all intel through Homeland Security and CIA," which is sublimely meaningless). Many of the show's central elements strain plausibility to the breaking point. Every good genre show requires some suspension of disbelief. "24," one of the best, demands a cryogenic freeze.
So -- which scenarios in "24" should you really find scary?
Would this season's bad guy, Habib Marwan, really ally his Islamist terrorists with non-jihadis to attack the United States?
It depends what the non-jihadis would be used for. Jihadist or Islamist cells have been known to employ or otherwise utilize non-jihadis for money laundering, document forgery and other tasks to facilitate an attack. For example, Hezbollah operatives have linked up with non-Muslim organized-crime syndicates in the poorly policed Triple Frontier region of South America, where Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina meet, generating a source of revenue for the militant Shiite organization. Similarly, the Madrid train-station bombers financed their attacks largely through selling hashish, which has made European counterterrorism officials fear increased cooperation between jihadis and gangsters. "That part of '24' is not far-fetched," says Cressey -- though the show is "taking it to an extreme."
That's because these contacts with outsiders tend to occur on the periphery of jihadist activity, and not without the network's "being very sure to seal off knowledge of vital details" about a particular plot, according to terrorism analyst Jonathan Stevenson of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. What's more, arrests of terrorism suspects in Europe indicate that non-jihadis enlisted to assist with even marginal aspects of financing or travel facilitation are often radicalized Muslims, demonstrating the reluctance jihadists feel in venturing too far beyond the ranks of the committed. Even if jihadis turned to outsiders for assistance in obtaining WMD, they would be unlikely to involve them in any plot to actually use such weapons.
Marwan, by contrast, not only uses non-jihadis liberally but also makes them central to his operations. Most egregiously, Marwan turns to Mitch Anderson, a flaxen-haired disgraced Air Force pilot, to hijack an F-117A stealth fighter (stay with us here) and attack Air Force One, a critical step in an attempt to gain control of a nuclear warhead and sow fear into the hearts of Americans. More generally, from Chinese nuclear physicists to African-American spies at CTU to unscrupulous U.S. defense contractors, Marwan's hiring policy may earn a commendation from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but it is pretty unrealistic.
