After Jack finished up a session of home brew torture directed at his girlfriend's almost-but-not-quite ex-husband (don't ask), it turned out that GABNQXH wasn't a bad guy after all. He was telling the truth all along, and after the girlfriend got Jack to ease up GABNQXH cheerfully (under the circumstances, anyway) opened up his laptop and found the information Jack wanted. What's more, this week GABNQXH was a positive sink of help, magically knowing how to open up a secure database before the bad guys neutralized it with a pulse bomb that took out half of LA in the process.
This is the third or fourth individual that has tortured according to a fairly loose definition of 'I know it when I see it' in this season of 24. In this notable case as well as the one immediately previous, both of the torturees are apparently good guys. The first was a CTU employee who was framed by a double-agent. She got several applications of a stun gun to the neck. The second individual, described above, got 110V of house current to his bare chest.
In both of these cases, the individuals were bruised, battered and scarred, but hard. And guess what? They turned right around (within an hour of their torture) and assisted the people who tortured them. Now this may be just part of 24's tortured (heh) plot twists, but is it realistic? That's hard to say.
I'm quite sure there are plenty of ways that you can extract a huge amount of pain from an individual without rendering any permanent damage. Isn't that what torturers know? As well, there are ways that you can deliver a great deal of permanent damage that doesn't show, or at least there used to be. File this in your 'bad old days' file. My father used to tell me that it was common practice for white cops to repeatedly slam telephone books on the heads of black arrestees. It left no marks but could easily deliver a severe concussion. These days, it's relatively simple to get an MRI to show swelling of the brain, but not so then.
We live with torture. It's a sad fact of life.
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