Not coincidentally, 24 was produced by the neocon Murdoch's Fox, and dramatized the same "ticking time-bomb" scenarios that Cheney was talking about on national TV in order to justify torture. Where you might think torturing one person is justified if it's going to help save thousands from the bomb, that kind of scenario never actually happens. Instead one of the main uses of torture was to extract "confessions" from people swiped from streets all over the world that they belonged to al-Qaeda, in order to justify the war aims of that criminal cabal of still-powerful and protected individuals.