So we now have our own Jack Bauer, hero of 24. He’s Stephen Harper, ready to take any step against terror, not squeamish like the terrsymps who voted down renewal of preventive arrest and forced testimony in Parliament this week. Oh, wait, we already had our own Jack Bauer: Canadian (and grandson of Tommy Douglas) Kiefer Sutherland, who is Jack Bauer on 24.

Jack doesn’t shrink from extreme measures, like torture. There were 67 torture scenes in his first five seasons. Stephen doesn’t shrink from extreme measures either, like those defeated measures, or from extreme language: “For the first time in history, we have a leader of the opposition who is soft on terrorism.” You’re with him or against him.

24 is so extreme that in the United States, the (real) military and spooks are begging the show to back off because it does more harm than good. The New Yorker reports that a general who is dean at West Point and some interrogators flew to the set to say torture doesn’t work, but the show is influencing U.S. soldiers in Iraq and elsewhere to do it. They want the producers to depict a case where torture “backfires,” like Abu Ghraib, and causes worse terror.

A spook who worked in Iraq said, “I never saw pain produce intelligence,” and he’s seen it all: waterboarding, dogs, sitting on a Humvee’s exhaust pipes. Forget it, said 24 producer Joel Surnow, who hangs with Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney. He says he doesn’t believe the experts. He probably saw torture work somewhere, oh yeah, on his own show.

The whole torture debate gets skewed because its justification usually centres around the case of a “ticking bomb” that almost never occurs (the “almost” is generous). Yet on 24, every case of torture is about a ticking bomb, usually nuclear. This season, one has already gone off in the United States and three are ticking as I write.

But I confess I don’t like 24. I find its production tacky and low-budget; its plots, repetitive. For the record I speak as a lifelong fan of the espionage genre, going back to I Spy, Callan, The Sandbaggers, 007 and Harry Palmer. I do feel sympathy for Mr. Sutherland, who has often tried to play down the drift of the show by saying anyone who takes it seriously has problems. When the worrywarts include Federal Bureau of Investigation interrogators and generals, his argument starts to sound shaky.

But I didn’t much like the plotline in the House this week either, over renewing those provisions on preventive arrest and coerced testimony. It was widely described as a hard choice between security and civil liberties, a problem of balancing them, etc. NDP Leader Jack Layton said we mustn’t give up the values that distinguish us.

But there are lots of things that contradict those values. I think economic inequity is at least as vile as torture or preventive arrest. The larger problem with torture, curtailing civil liberties and the whole war on terror is that it doesn’t even work; it makes future terror more likely. What effect do you think Abu Ghraib or the “rendition” of Maher Arar had on recruiting jihadi terrorists, or neutralizing far larger numbers in the Muslim world who won’t become terrorists but may not actively oppose them?

U.S. terrorism maven Peter Bergen, who is not soft on terror, says the war on Iraq increased deaths from Islamic terror sevenfold worldwide by corroborating — his words — “al-Qaeda’s central message”: that the United States is at war with Islam. In this sense, it is Mr. Harper and George W. Bush (and 24‘s producers) who are soft on terror because their notions of combatting it make it ever more likely.

This is the infuriating rub. Mr. Bush gets to feel like a cowboy or whatever he’s doing. Mr. Harper gets to indulge his ideology or his resentment, whatever drives him. And everyone else pays the price. Since 9/11, many thousands have died because of this kind of wrong-headedness and many more will till it all returns to this continent again.

Bin Laden obsessive and former U.S. counterterrorism official Michael Scheuer says a nuclear attack on the United States is now “close to inevitable.” Then we really will need Jack. Not Kiefer, not Stephen. The real Jack. And he’s a fiction.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.