My good friend Larry turned me on to "24" this season, and I confess that despite some atrociously silly plot elements, I've come to enjoy the show--so much so that I used my digital recorder to find parts of three earlier seasons enjoying runs on various cable channels, so that now I'm in a marathon Jack Bauer festival, juggling four 24-hour days of nerve gas, atomic weapons, killer viruses and vindictive assassins around my usually busy television schedule.
I can't imagine what would happen if the security at our real anti-terror agencies was as porous as that of the Los Angeles office of the fictional Counter Terrorist Unit, or CTU. Let's see, in the four seasons I've watched so far (at least in part), this critical agency has been bombed once with a conventional weapon (after a security breach) and attacked--successfully--with nerve gas (after another security breach). You'd think after the first bombing, they would have beefed up security--but maybe the head of security had an "in" with Jack Abrahamoff.
Those same security guys are constantly managing to lose people they're holding in custody. At least once per "day" it seems that a bad guy escapes (or is killed trying to escape, before giving up crucial information). If I was a bad guy brought into CTU, I'd try to escape too, since it seems pretty easy.
Also, for some reason, the good guys are constantly getting arrested and held in custody at CTU, but they usually escape too (I guess that having seen how easy it is for the bad guys to get away, they figure their chances are good, too). Just this season, Chloe escaped twice. Now, if that happened in a real life agency, you'd think someone would get fired (if they weren't killed by the nerve gas). Or maybe the President would give 'em a cute nickname and a promotion for being loyal.)
Then there's the double agents. It seems that apart from Jack Bauer, just about any of the other agents might just be working for someone else. I could see this happening once, but shouldn't they tighten screening after the first, second, third or fourth time?
And what about following rules and procedures? No one does. Just about every hour of the show at least one CTU employee is operating as a rogue, stealing agency resources to help Jack Bauer, talking furtively on their cell phones (here's a good idea--ban CTU employees from having cell phones), tricking other CTU employees into doing something illegal or telling lies to their superiors. What do they think this is--Congress? (Even FEMA under Heckuva Job Brownie wasn't that incompetent!)
At least the plot this season is solidly plausible: the President, in a bid to get Russian oil, secretly arranges to let a Russian terrorist group have access to a couple dozen canisters of VX nerve gas that it could use against Russian interests, thereby justifying a U.S. invasion under a new treaty to stop the terrorists. But, the plan goes awry and the terrorists nearly gas Los Angeles instead, before Jack Bauer manages to stop them (but they do gas CTU). The President tries to cover up the plot--which required him to authorize the assassination of the most recent ex-President. My guess is that in a couple of weeks Jack Bauer will finally succeed in exposing the plot and bring down the current President, who looks suspicously like Richard Nixon.
Here's an idea for next season, although I grant it's awfully far-fetched: a new President (they'll need one after they get rid of the Nixon clone) decides he wants to avenge a failed assassination attempt on his father--a former President--by the dictator of a middle eastern state. To cover up the motive, the President and his cronies cherry-pick a few unsubstantiated pieces of intelligence data to convince the country that the dictator poses a threat to the U.S. and the rest of the world. When much of the world still doesn't buy it, they send in too few troops, with the wrong training and poor equipment, without any plan whatsoever after they remove the dictator and create a power vacuum in the foreign state. A civil war ensues, but the President labels one side "terrorist counterinsurgents" to justify the continued occupation of the foreign state as part of the war against terrrorism. All the while, the real terrorist mastermind is hiding in the badlands of Pakistan, where fortunately, Jack Bauer nabs him. Now that would be a show!
(And yes, Saddam Hussein did try to assassinate, with a car-bomb, former President Bush Sr. (after he was out of office) in 1993 while Bush Sr. was in Kuwait for a ceremony to commemorate the victory over Iraq in Gulf War I. After an investigation by the Clinton administation tied the plot to Iraqi intelligence, he ordered a cruise missile strike that leveled the headquarters of the Iraqi secret police.)
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