It's not all bad news, though. While these shows might serve as a how-to guide for Successful Crimin', that knowledge means nothing if the student is a careless dum-dum. As a real CSI once explained:

When they try to escape detection from what they see on CSI, they're actually leaving more evidence. A good example of that is instead of licking an envelope (for fear of providing DNA in their saliva) they'll use adhesive tape. Well, they'll probably leave fingerprints on the tape, and it'll pick up hairs and fibers from the surroundings. So the more effort you put into trying to evade detection, honestly, the more evidence you leave behind.

There's no better example of this than Jermaine McKinney, who used every trick from CSI (his favorite show) to destroy evidence of a brutal double murder. The brilliant plan fell apart not as a result of equally brilliant detective work, but because McKinney tried to dispose of the murder weapon by throwing it in a frozen lake.

Related: 5 True Crime Stories That Sound Like The Worst Movie Ever

In 2006, a delegation of military personnel -- which included the dean of West Point, as well as several high-level interrogation experts from the FBI and CIA -- visited the set of 24 in order to raise several concerns. Chief among these was that as a result of the show's popularity amongst military personnel, recruits increasingly believed that torturing people was a justifiable act if done in the service of their country -- so much so that a group of soldiers in Iraq had to be stopped from psychologically torturing a captured enemy combatant using a method that they'd seen on 24.

As the delegation also pointed out, torture is practically useless as a means of extracting information from the types of hardcore religious extremists the show continually rolled out, many of whom in real life would "almost welcome torture." This shouldn't be a surprise, but the show's writers didn't listen to the delegation, and used the opportunity to only talk about truth serums and hypothetical ticking-bomb scenarios ... as well as argue that actually, there's a super secret cheat code within the Constitution that makes torture legal. This is something that no serious legal scholars believe, although it's the sort of imaginative garbage that we'd expect from the minds that brought us an hour of Elisha Cuthbert being menaced by a cougar.

Related: 5 True Crime Stories That Had Unbelievable Plot Twists

Related: 4 Celebrities Whose Fictional Crimes Turned Real

No, really.

CBS RadioThanks a lot, Crosby.

In 1948, a religious scholar from Egypt named Sayyid Qutb took up a scholarship at a teaching college in Greeley, Colorado. The purpose of the scholarship was to allow Qutb to study how our education system worked. Instead of an appreciation for underfunding and overcrowding, however, Qutb finished his two-year scholarship with a raging hatred of the West, which he considered to a shallow, materialistic, debauched place with no redeeming features. This was a moral condition he felt was summed up best by the song "Baby, It's Cold Outside."

The dance hall convulsed to the tunes on the gramophone and was full of bounding feet and seductive legs. Arms circled waists, lips met lips, chests met chests, and the atmosphere was full of passion.

A dialogue between a boy and a girl returning from their evening date. The boy took the girl to his home and kept her from leaving. She entreated him to let her return home, for it was getting late and her mother was waiting, but every time she would make an excuse, he would reply to her with his line: but baby it's cold outside.

Qutb entered the U.S. a mild-mannered bookworm. He left a hardcore religious fundamentalist. Over the next two decades, Qutb channeled his hatred into reinterpreting the Quran in such a way that it could be read as justifying not only the creation of a "true" Islamic state, but also mass violence against non-believers and members of other religions. Qutb was executed in 1966 for attempting to assassinate the president of Egypt, but his works lived on and developed a devoted following -- a following that came to include Osama bin Laden.

There you go, time travelers! If you want to stop both 9/11 and Islamic fundamentalism in general, we recommend paying a visit to a dance hall in the 1940s and changing the record.

Adam Wears is on Twitter, and has a newsletter dedicated to depressing history facts. It's not as heartbreakingly sad as it sounds, promise!

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