[Peace-discuss] Two articles on "24"

[David Green]

1. New York Times
2. frontpagemag.com
 
January 9, 2005
FRANK RICH 
We'll Win This War - on '24'

OES anyone still remember the war on terror? On Sunday
night, Jan. 9, it will be lobbed back onto the TV
screen like a hand grenade with the new season of
"24," Fox's all-cliffhangers, all-the-time series
about Jack Bauer, the relentless American intelligence
agent played by Kiefer Sutherland. You will find no
plot surprises divulged here. But tune in, and you'll
return, not necessarily nostalgically, to the
do-or-die post-9/11 battle that has been all but
forgotten as we remain trapped in its nominally
connected sequel, the war against Saddam Hussein. 
This show is having none of President Bush's notion
that Iraq is "the central front in the war on terror."
In "24," the central front of that war is the American
home front, not Mosul. "We weren't thinking of the war
in Iraq when we came up with this story," said Joel
Surnow, the show's co-creator, when I spoke with him
last week. On "24," they're thinking about Islamic
terrorism instead of Baathist insurgents, about
homeland security instead of the prospects for an
election in the Sunni triangle.
In the America of "24," as in the real one, government
bureaucrats are busier fighting each other than Al
Qaeda. Trains are unprotected from terrorists, and so
is the Internet. The handsome Turkish family next door
in sun-dappled Southern California is a sleeper cell
the F.B.I. didn't find. The secretary of defense must
not only contend with terrorists but also with a glib
antiwar son who, in his view, has succumbed to
"sixth-grade Michael Moore logic." Dad, amusingly
enough, is played by William Devane, the actor who
first became famous 30 years ago impersonating John F.
Kennedy in a television drama ("The Missiles of
October") about a colder war where the battle lines
were clearly drawn.
In its own way, "24" is as provocative as a Moore
manifesto. It shows but does not moralize about the
use of abuse and torture by Americans interrogating
terrorists; the results cut both ways in the four
hours of the season I've seen, and there's a hint, as
vibrant as an orange jumpsuit, that American
criminality at Guantánamo may guarantee ugly payback
in the O.C. as well as in the Middle East. The Council
on American-Islamic Relations, meanwhile, has already
protested this season's portrayal of Muslims. Though
Mr. Surnow says that later episodes will include
positive Muslim characters, he makes no apologies for
focusing on the bad guys (and one very bad woman,
played by the Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo, of
"The House of Sand and Fog"). He regrets that he
"pulled punches" a couple of seasons back by using
generic terrorists of murky provenance with
indefinable accents. "This year we deal with it," he
says. "This is what we fear - Islamic terrorism. This
is what we are fighting."
Richard Clarke, the former American counterterrorism
chief who once helped lead that fight, has yet to
catch up with "24." But in coincidental tandem with
its premiere, he is giving it some competition: for
the cover of the January-February issue of The
Atlantic Monthly, he has written his own distressing
piece of fiction about the war he feels has been
sabotaged if not lost by mismanagement, complacency
and the squandering of resources in Iraq. 
Titled "Ten Years Later," it takes the form of a
10th-anniversary 9/11 lecture given by Professor Roger
McBride at the Kennedy School of Government. This
professor, like Jack in "24," does not buy into what
Jonathan Raban, writing in The New York Review of
Books, calls "the pretense of fighting terrorists
abroad to prevent them from attacking us at home." As
McBride looks back at our decade from the vantage
point of 2011, he finds that we have prevented little
by fighting in Iraq. He sees an America that has
endured horrors at home strikingly similar to those on
Fox's show: assaults on rail transportation, a
computer virus that wipes out the nation's cyber
infrastructure, the rise of "Al Qaeda of North
America" and the panicky instigation of new Patriot
Acts that remake America into Philip Roth's nightmare
of a fascistic Lindbergh presidency.
This fictional lecture is heavily footnoted with
actual sources and hard, detailed information about
our current security shortfalls. The reader learns
that Mr. Clarke is not indulging in idle fantasy when
he speculates that the next terrorist assault on
American economic might is less likely to involve
airplanes and financial district skyscrapers than
backpacks and Winnebagos wreaking havoc at the
Mouseworld theme park in Florida, the Lion's Grand
casino in Las Vegas and the Mall of the States in
Minnesota. But why would Mr. Clarke choose fiction as
a vehicle for this dark, fact-based scenario? 
"In both the Clinton and Bush administrations, the
only time I was really effective in getting senior
officers to pay attention was when I had tabletop war
games," he said in an interview. "That did more than
any briefing paper I might write." Few critics of the
American fight against terrorism, both before and
since 9/11, have had more of a public forum than Mr.
Clarke, who gave dramatic, widely televised testimony
before the 9/11 commission and published one of 2004's
biggest sellers, "Against All Enemies." Yet he still
feels, not without reason, that his message has failed
to land. "On 9/11 my staff was consoling me," he says.
"They said, 'You didn't stop it but at least
everything you wanted to get done will get done. It
will just happen.' For a while it did. Then it petered
out. It's sad. We had the window of opportunity and
just didn't know how to use it."
His next attempt to make himself heard will also be
fiction: a novel steeped in national security and
foreign policy, scheduled to be published in October.
Though it may not have sex scenes - "it's one of those
things I'm debating" - Mr. Clarke sees popular
fiction, which can outsell nonfiction by several
multiples, as a way of reaching a still larger
audience. He has also contributed some ideas to the
script of "Dirty War," an HBO-BBC docudrama (to be
shown Jan. 24 on HBO) that "24"-style portrays a
self-satisfied British government as woefully
ill-equipped to either prevent or respond to Islamic
terrorists' detonation of a dirty bomb in central
London. 
"Pop culture is frequently ahead of where the news
media are on these things," he says. And ahead of the
government as well. Condoleezza Rice famously said in
2002, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that
these people would take an airplane and slam it into
the World Trade Center." As we've since learned from
several investigations, threat reports circulated
within the American government predicted such airplane
scenarios repeatedly before 9/11; one 1998 threat
specifically targeted the twin towers. But fiction had
been there earlier still. Mr. Clarke, like many
others, cites the prescience of Tom Clancy's 1994
novel, "Debt of Honor," in which a Boeing 747 is
crashed into the Capitol by a Japanese airman during a
joint session of Congress, and the 1996 movie
"Executive Decision," in which Kurt Russell battles
Islamic terrorists who have seized control of another
747 so they can detonate a biological weapon in
Washington.
Mr. Clarke says that friends who have read early
copies of his Atlantic piece are e-mailing him to say,
"See, it's already happening." But in his view we've
hardly seen anything yet. "Madrid - 3/11 - could
happen today in any of our major cities," he says.
"There was security for the trains going from
Washington to New York for the Republican National
Convention, but what about the rest of the year?"
Private security, he adds, is just as porous as
government security: "When I go to an office building,
I routinely sign in as Benjamin Franklin and no one
ever objects. I show them my driver's license, which
doesn't say 'Benjamin Franklin,' and they don't care."
Care must begin at the top, of course. In retrospect,
Bernie Kerik's short-lived nomination as the new
homeland security czar - "mind-blowing," as Mr. Clarke
puts it - shows just how little concern there is. If
homeland security were a top priority for the White
House, someone would have discovered that the man
selected to run the most sprawling new federal
bureaucracy since the Defense Department in 1947 could
not even manage his own personal finances, let alone
his sex life. Were homeland security still a top
priority for the country, the Kerik implosion might
have whipped up some of the public outcry once sparked
by the whistle-blowing F.B.I. agent Coleen Rowley (who
quietly retired last month). But like duct tape and
color-coded terror alerts before it, the Kerik
nomination instead turned instantly into a
Leno-Letterman gag that allowed us to dispel any
lingering 9/11 fears with laughter.
Lost amid all those yuks was the full weight of last
month's farewell confession of defeat by Tommy
Thompson, the outgoing secretary of health and human
services: "I, for the life of me, cannot understand
why terrorists have not, you know, attacked our food
supply, because it is so easy to do." He was followed
out the administration's door in December by the
Homeland Security Department's inspector general,
Clark Kent Ervin (an actual official, despite his
semifictional name), a Bush appointee whose history
with the president goes back to the governor's office
in Texas. Asked by Mimi Hall of USA Today what was
wrong with his department, he replied, "It's difficult
to figure out where to start," then described a
dysfunctional agency that has failed to plug most
holes in the nation's security net but has succeeded
triumphantly in wasting taxpayers' money on bonuses
and perks. His specific complaints overlap and confirm
those in Mr. Clarke's "fiction" for The Atlantic. 
But Mr. Ervin's final shots were barely noticed in the
merriment that followed revelations of Mr. Kerik's
ground zero love nest. He may now elucidate them
further in a planned book, but you have to wonder if
even best-selling nonfiction books written with the
you-are-there zing of popular fiction - a description
that fits both "Against All Enemies" and "The 9/11
Commission Report" - can wake up a country that has
been so successfully distracted from the war initially
declared after 9/11. As Mr. Clarke's Professor McBride
says, "The several years without an attack on U.S.
soil lulled some Americans into thinking that the war
on terror was taking place only overseas." According
to a roundup by the political newsletter Hotline, when
some 20 Washington pundits made year-end talk-show
predictions for the year to come, only one (Evan
Thomas of Newsweek) foresaw the possibility of a
domestic terrorist attack.
By common consent, 2004 was the year that Jon
Stewart's fake news became more reliable for many
viewers than real news. As 2005 begins, we must
confront the prospect that a fictional TV action hero
is more engaged with the war on terror than those in
Washington who actually have his job.


Hollywood Discovers Radical Islam
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 6, 2005
The war on terror has not been the subject of a single
American feature film nor, so far as I know, is there
one in the works. But television is proving a bit
braver and things should get interesting on Sunday,
Jan. 9, when Fox begins a new season of its action
show, called 24. 
Why the absence of movies on the current war? Jack
Valenti, then-head of the Motion Picture Association
of America, once replied with questions of his own: 
Who would you have as the enemy if you made a picture
about terrorism? You’d probably have Muslims, would
you not? If you did, I think there would be backlash
from the decent, hard-working, law-abiding Muslim
community in this country.
That’s what some call a pre-emptive cringe. Others
call it dhimmitude. 
 
In any case, the most recent big-budget movie to deal
with terrorism was 2002’s Sum of All Fears (“27,000
Nuclear Weapons. One Is Missing”), based on a Tom
Clancy novel of the same name. The novel had Arab
terrorists setting off a nuclear device at football’s
Super Bowl but the movie, under pressure from Islamist
organizations, features neo-Nazi terrorists. (“I hope
you will be reassured,” Director Phil Alden Robinson
wrote in early 2001 to the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, “that I have no intention of promoting
negative images of Muslims or Arabs, and I wish you
the best in your continuing efforts to combat
discrimination.”) 
 
In an review of recent movies, Jonathan V. Last finds
that, “If anything, the PC pressure has been upped
since the war on terror began.” The first break in the
silence came in mid-2004, when The Grid, a TNT
mini-series, took on radical Islam. Last termed it
“the bravest, most-daring piece of entertainment in
years,” precisely because Tracey Alexander and Brian
Eastman, its executive producers, did not whitewash
all forms of Islam. 
 
An excerpt from The Grid’s second episode, concerning
a Lebanese national named Fuqara, arrested as he tries
to flee the United States after trying to murder an
FBI agent, gives its flavor. Fuqara is interrogated by
Agent Canary while his attorney tries to stop the
proceedings:
Agent Canary: Mr. Fuqara, who ordered you to commit
the assassination? 
Fuqara: (Mutters in Arabic.)
Fuqara’s Attorney (to Agent Canary): Can we have a
moment outside? (The two exit the room.) Don’t you
dare threaten him with a rend writ.
Agent Canary: He has information about planned attacks
here that could threaten thousands of American lives.
Fuqara’s Attorney:  And that gives you the right to
summarily dismiss Mr. Fuqara’s rights? Hey, why stop
there? Deport all the Muslims in America to win your
war!
Agent Canary:  I might suggest some rights stop at
mass murder.
Fuqara’s Attorney: They don’t. And until there is an
amendment to the constitution to that effect, I will
protect Mr. Fuqara’s rights.
A second break will come in a few days, when the Fox
Channel’s 24 shows four episodes depicting a Muslim
family as coming to the United States solely to
implement attacks against Americans. To do so, they
masquerade as just folk. Here is how Jim Finkle of
Broadcasting & Cable describes them: “One of the
villains is a Walkman-toting, bubble-gum-chewing
teenager who fights with his conservative Dad about
dating an American girl and talking on the phone.” 
 
But this is a disguise.
 
The young man also helps his parents mastermind a plot
to kill large numbers of Americans that begins with an
attack on a train. Over the breakfast table, the
father tells his son: “What we will accomplish today
will change the world. We are fortunate that that our
family has been chosen to do this.” “Yes, father,” his
son replies.
 
The terrorists manage to take the secretary of defense
as a hostage; and the movie climaxes with the
secretary shown on a gruesome Internet video like
those coming out of Iraq, then tried for “war crimes
against humanity.”
 
Predictably, 24 has the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, the country’s lead Islamist outfit, in a
tizzy. CAIR spokeswoman Rabiah Ahmed complains that
“They are taking everyday American Muslim families and
making them suspects. They’re making it seem like
families are co-conspirators in this terrorist plot.” 
 
Melanie McFarland, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s
television critic, has no patience for such whining:
“this is 24, OK? Anyone who watches it knows the show
borrows aspects of real nightmares to drive its plots,
paying little attention to political correctness.”  
 
But there is another reason to stick with the plot as
it is. Nearly every terrorist suspect in the West is
said to be a regular guy or a wonderful gal, as I have
previously shown. The adjectives applied to Sajid
Mohammed Badat, a Briton, are typical: “a walking
angel,” “the bright star of our mosque,” “a friendly,
warm, fun-loving character,” “a friendly, sociable,
normal young lad, who had lots of friends and did not
hold extreme views in any way.” Despite those raves,
he has been indicted for helping shoe-bomber Richard C
Reid attempt to blow up an airliner and will face
trial on conspiracy charges (he was found with parts
for more shoe bombs like those Reid used). 
 
Just last week, the Seattle Times reported on a Saudi
now being deported from the United States: 

To his co-workers at the University of Washington
School of Nursing, Majid al-Massari was a happy guy
who bounced down the halls and seemed like a "big
teddy bear." What his friends didn't know about the
burly, bearded 34-year-old computer-security
specialist was that he had helped set up a Web site
for a group linked to al-Qaida, quoted Osama bin Laden
in his own Internet postings, lashed out against
American policies on his father's London-based radio
show and had landed in the sights of U.S. terrorism
investigators.
This sort of surprise happens with such consistency
that I am tempted to generalize: On arrest, every
single Islamist in the West is initially hailed as a
delightful person, and never as a hate-filled brooding
loner. 
 
So, hooray for Fox for portraying reality; and may it
not cave to the Islamists. 
 
Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the
Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures
(Transaction Publishers).