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As far as 24 goes, it didn't air until after the Sept 11 attacks, but it went into production 6 months before, and was first conceived of sometime in 2000. While a few 9-11 truther types would have it that this was part of a long-planned propaganda campaign, I don't believe that - 'two-fisted cop who doesn't go by the book' is a decades-old trope. I do think that the experience of terrorism helped to build the audience for the show and make it a huge hit, though, when it might have seemed absurdly overblown if it had screened a year earlier.

I was thinking more about how there were a whole stack of movies exploring different aspects of torture in great detail, typically with unpleasant dilemmas, eg the Saw franchise, Hostel etc. etc.. Now I don't think these are exclusively a response to American policy either - the opst-2000 cultural context also included things like Al-Qaeda terrorists decapitating Daniel Pearl and uploading the videos to Youtube and so forth.



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