ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ways in which cultural representations co-constitute and disseminate justifications of torture. It shows the ways in which tortures justification and normalisation can be shored up even in the course of narratives that would seem to expose or condemn torture. This is because one of the major ways that torture has been represented after 9/11 is through the field of intelligibility made available by counterterrorism discourse, which is remarkably adept at absorbing and defusing critique. The chapter reads three texts and shows the ways in which this mobile, flexible, and acquisitive field of intelligibility operates to describe torture as a valuable counterterrorism technology. It discusses the relationship that these texts have with the notion of the political exception: the way they invoke, naturalise, critique, challenge or expose it. The notion of necessity that fuels the ticking bomb scenario saturates 24: the choices of Counter Terrorist Unit (CTU) and Jack in particular are inevitably justified by results.
