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will say. Yes, I suppose he is. But a deeper look suggests that we live in an era in which the relevant legal lines are drawn in shifting sand. For example, what is the legal status of the drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen I mentioned above? We are not at war with these countries formally. These governments have not officially allowed or invited these attacks. In recent testimony before Congress, David Glazier, a former Navy officer and current law professor, argued that the CIA’s drone pilots are “liable to prosecution . . . for any injuries, deaths or property damage they cause.” Additionally, Glazier argued that “these CIA officers as well as any higher-level government officials who have authorized or directed their attacks are committing war crimes.”55 U.S. drone and missile attacks taking place on foreign territory are illegal acts of aggression and every victim—innocent or not—has been murdered without trial by Americans.

I’m just saying.

The Iraqi government expelled Blackwater from the country because of the widespread illegality of their actions there, as documented by Scahill and others. Under the Bush administration, hundreds of men and boys as young as twelve were illegally detained, flown to third countries for interrogation (often including torture), and then warehoused at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, with no legal basis ever having been established for any of this. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell during the Bush administration, has recently stated that top White House officials knew full well that most of those being held at Guantanamo were innocent of any crime. Referring to Vice President Cheney, Wilkerson wrote, “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent . . . If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”56

Even Dexter, a serial killer, holds himself to a higher moral standard than that.

Lest you think I’m being politically partisan, let’s not forget to mention that President Obama has reportedly signed off on plans to assassinate an American citizen living in Yemen, without due process of any kind.57 This is far from an aberration in current American activities around the world. Independent journalist and constitutional scholar Glenn Greenwald has documented the many ways in which the Obama administration has simply continued many of the blatantly illegal practices begun under the previous administration, even as attempts to investigate or prosecute those who authorized them in the first place are obstructed by Obama appointees.58 Sorry to harsh your buzz, but we are talking about murder, after all.

I’ve never made it through an entire episode of 24. A few minutes of Jack Bauer’s sneering snarl is enough to break my resolve. Everyone breaks eventually, you know. The unabashed celebration of torturing foreign “terrorists” feels too much like brain-washing to me. One of the show’s co-creators, Cyrus Nowrasteh, whose father was an advisor to the torture-happy Shah of Iran,59 explained the show’s Cheney-esque rationale to Jane Mayer of The New Yorker: “Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” he said. “It’s a deep, dark ugly world out there . . . It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business—even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy.”

But of course, this isn’t a “fantasy” so much as an irrational, yet emotionally satisfying, justification for a reality that was, until very recently, considered criminal by all “civilized” nations. In this, as in so many other parts of American life, the televised fantasy prepares the public to accept radical reconfigurations of reality. Mayer points out that before the attacks of September 11, “fewer than four acts of torture appeared on prime-time television each year,” but that, “now there are more than a hundred.” Perhaps even more significant is the fact that pre-9/11, the torturers were almost