I find this a little bit disingenuous:

Slate: One of the places where 24 and the real world have intersected most powerfully is on the question of torture. On 24, torture is regularly used in interrogation. Some critics believe that 24 actually plays to our desire to witness torture, that it is, in some sense, “torture porn.” How do you make sense of and justify the role of torture in the show?

Loceff: I absolutely do not believe that the show is, in any sense, torture porn. This is something we talk about a lot. Torture is of no interest to us as torture, and we’re not anxious to show it, nor do we want to watch it. We don’t want to go to any level of great detail in depicting it, and there are many times when we will pull back from the original idea because it seems too much. I think its real use in the show, aside from its narrative function, is to create dramatic conflict, conflict not just between two people but within characters as well. If you look at any given torture scene in the show, you’ll find that there’s something in it that shows someone’s distaste or disgust. And Jack Bauer’s decision to torture people for information in the past has cost him, because it’s shown other people just exactly what he’s capable of. Jack himself is appalled by what he feels he has to do, but he’s also convinced he has to do it. That is a real dramatic conflict.

Slate: One of the familiar critiques of using torture as an interrogation technique is that it doesn’t work. On 24 it tends to be very effective.

Loceff: I don’t know that torture works, and we don’t write it because we think it works. So, I don’t think any of us are trying to make a statement about the efficacy of it one way or the other.

Now, I am not a regular follower of the show. I watched some of the first two seasons and followed along with the TWOP recaps for the first three. So it is possible that I am missing some important nuance in the show. However, the writer’s description does not seem to match what actually happens on the show. The writer claims that torture is used sparingly and is not something they like to show. They further claim that it has had a deleterious effect upon Jack. If either is the case, then why does it happen so bloody often on the show, and why does Bauer never seem to suffer for his decisions to employ torture with the same frequency that Pizza Delivery drivers exceed the speed limit? The writers are simply not credible when they claim that they take the use of torture in the show seriously. It appears to be nothing more than a plot device they fall back upon either out of laziness or ideological bent.

The comments about the not trying to make a statement about the effectiveness of torture may be true, but whether they intend to or not, they show torture in a good light. Generally speaking, the tortured people always have information and the torture is effective in a very, very short period of time. If 24 aspired to any kind of veracity, six or seven episodes would be dedicated to showing Jack torturing someone to get information. We would see water boarding, electrocution, and vicious beatings for hours on end. And then we would have two episodes dedicated to showing Jack run off with the information the torture produced, only to discover that he had been lied to and sent on a wild goose chase. The last episode would show the terrorists smiling as Jack fails to foil the plot because he wasted time on the torture. But torture almost always works on the show, and it is almost always shown as quick and effective. Whether they intend to or not, they are showing torture as an acceptable, useful, even desirable option.

If they don’t want the show to be torture porn, they need to work a lot harder than they have to date.