Not bad, but I still prefer the Jack Nicholson version.

The Dark Knight scene isn’t really a relevant example because The Joker’s entire purpose is to be an inhuman sociopath with absolutely zero morals. Even the world’s population of jihadist terrorists is not as far gone as The Joker on the chaos as purpose scale.

Most people do not believe inflicting physical or psychological harm on an enemy for the purposes of obtaining life-saving information is more of a moral affront than the potential consequences of not getting that information.

England let the Nazis burn a city to the ground so that Nazis would not know they cracked the code. The idea that situations like the ones depicted in 24 are nonexistent is foolish utopianism. Most of the bad people in the world are not sociopaths, they can be coerced given the proper incentives. Physical comfort is usually up there as a priority.

Ultimately the CIA is the back room of the US Military. They do the ugly work that they must do to keep us safe. We praise our soldiers because they risk their lives for us, but it is the CIA who often have to finish the job to get the information our soldiers need. It is hard and dirty work that never nets you praise, because it is much easier to wax philosophical about beating swords into plowshares than it is to acknowledge the world is an ugly and brutal place and there are people right now tempering their plowshares into swords with intent to harm you.

What would be interesting is to have a TV show where the criminal is evil, but the police can’t get evidence.

So they just walk up with civil forfeiture papers, and take everything that he owns, even the car he’s riding in (if it’s not his, tough – take it anyway). When he complains about lack of evidence, the police point out that they don’t need any.
And laugh.

I wonder how many of these torture-loving right-wingers would suddenly have second thoughts?

I think there’s a huge difference between a bad guy the audience sympathizes with to some degree, and a good guy who sometimes does bad things for good ends. Perhaps you don’t see much of a difference between Tony Soprano and Jack Ryan, or between Omar Little and Jack Bauer, but I think most audiences do.

Jonah is absolutely right. Characters who are clearly portrayed as fundamentally decent and righteous are often shown doing brutal things to bad guys, or suspected bad guys, and audiences accept that. If torture were remotely as abhorrent to people as you would have us believe, writers and filmmakers would never be able to get away with this.

But, similar actions in the context of a documentary would elicit revulsion from the audience. Consider, for instance, the reaction people have to simulated movie executions versus watching clips of actual brutal executions. The viewer’s reactions are very different because reality has a much higher ethical weight than fiction. Thus even things that are “part of our actual social worlds” can be trivialized in fiction.