The Jack Bauer Effect

IN WAR, is it ever OK to torture an enemy? "For decades, the answer was an automatic no," writes Daniel Stone of The Daily Beast. That answer was driven in part by the memory of how American POWs were brutally treated in WWII (think Bataan Death March) and Vietnam (think Hanoi Hilton). But times have changed. Per a new American Red Cross survey, nearly 60 percent of American teenagers thought torture (water-boarding, etc) are sometimes acceptable. Even more surprisingly, about 41 percent thought it was OK for American troops to be tortured overseas. Scholars blame programs like "24" for "de-stigmatizing torture" and trivializing serious issues, per Stone. Lawrence Tribe, a constitutional law professor at Harvard, observed: "For young people, to put themselves in place of a soldier is a level of empathy that most people simply don’t have anymore.” This chilling report breathes new life into George Santayana's assertion that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."