I've been a fan since season one and I still sit on the edge of my seat as the plot twists and turns. Did you see Monday's? Fantastic! I will be the first to admit however that Jack's seeming invulnerability has taken something from the show. Perhaps rather than keeping a lid on plot details if they kept the status of Sutherland's contract out of the public sphere it might return a semblence of mortality to the character.
As for Jack the government operative, I think that he is an idealised interpretation of an American defender. He has more in common with say, Captain America than any living person. He uses methods that, while academicaly questionable, are in practice efficiencies that allow him to achieve his goals. Interestingly, that phrase is the sort of thing the terrorists he fights would say that they are doing. They cannot, for example, keep the US out of their country through conventional warfare and so they use methods that while questionable, allow them to achieve their goals. As such the differences have to be found not in the actions but in the motivations. Jack is not a terrorist as his goal is not the destruction of a society or state through terrorism. He is a defender of the society from enemies who are seeking to destroy it via terrorism. Indeed, there have been occasions in the past when the fictional US administration was rushing into reprisal attacks on the Middle East and Jack again did his utmost to prevent that, knowing the course was incorrect. He thus did not believe for example, in season three (I think) that the people of the Middle East deserved death under American assault in response to the attack on the US. Whereas the terrorists almost uniformly feel that, regardless of individual culpability, Americans deserve to die in the name of their cause.
:twocents: