With the help of the hit TV show, 24, torture has reached pop-culture (even punchline) status in America.

Mayer helps show how Charles Krauthammer's near-non-existent "ticking clock" scenario has been popularized by "24" in such a way as to normalize torture in the public consciousness. In five seasons of "24", there have been sixty-seven torture scenes, and all of them are portrayed as effective, productive, and justified. Military cadets, weaned on '24", now tend to see nothing wrong with it. Soldiers in the field have internalized the show's ethics. One witness to this is Tony Lagouranis, a former army interrogator in Iraq. He tells Mayer that some soldiers in Iraq just replicated the "24" scenes in real life - even though torture is still nominally illegal under American law for the regular military (the Bush administration has created a special CIA torture unit to do the job instead).