TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE
Directed by Alex Gibney. May 16-22. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel).
4 stars
December 2002 was a particularly unlucky time for a taxi driver from rural Afghanistan named Dilawar. The young cabbie was carrying a fare toward his hometown of Yakubi when he was stopped at a U.S. Army checkpoint and identified as a suspect in a rocket attack on the encampment earlier that day. He and his three passengers were arrested and transported to Bagram Airbase for interrogation by an American Army unit.
Five days later, Dilawar was dead.
The other occupants of the cab got off relatively easy—they were deemed “high-value detainees” and “renditioned” to the U.S. army base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba for another 15 months of interrogation, even though American forces eventually determined that the rocket attack of which they were accused was actually perpetrated by the same Afghani commander who turned them over to U.S. forces as suspects.
During his time at Bagram, Dilawar was subjected to “interrogation techniques” that included sleep deprivation, forced standing (he was suspended from the ceiling of his cell by his wrists), and repeated “non-lethal” blows to his legs administered by a rotating crew of beefy U.S. soldiers. An autopsy revealed that, had Dilawar survived the physical abuse that precipitated his death, it would have been necessary to amputate his legs. Shortly after his death, the commander of intelligence operations received a new assignment: to oversee the interrogation of detainees at Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad... but not before she was decorated for valour in the service of her country.
So who was to blame for the torture and murder of this innocent man—one of tens of thousands of detainees who have been “processed” by U.S. and coalition forces in the prosecution of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Documentarian Alex
Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) uses Dilawar’s unfortunate story to explore how torture
and mistreatment of detainees became the official policy of the American government in Taxi to the Dark Side, the winner of this year’s Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and compulsory viewing for anyone
unfamiliar with the term “banality of evil.”
The official explanation has always been that the atrocities of Abu Ghraib were the work of “a few bad apples” and that the United States “does not torture,” but Taxi to the Dark Side decodes the bureaucratic language, legalistic hair-splitting, and obfuscation that the White House used to not only steamroller the Geneva Conventions’ definitions of acceptable treatment of prisoners of war, but to thoroughly cover their asses lest anyone ever try to prosecute the U.S. executive branch for war crimes. In a particularly chilling soundbite, for example, former Justice Department legal counsel John Yoo calmly explains how the president might be able to conjure legally defensible reasons for crushing the testicles of a detainee’s child in the name of national security.
Though Taxi to the Dark Side is packed with disturbing imagery—some of which will be familiar to anyone who has followed the Abu Ghraib scandal in the media—and repugnant notions, Gibney’s style is the very opposite of Michael Moore’s first-person rabble-rousing or Morgan Spurlock’s stunt documentarianism, approaches that must be very tempting to any nonfiction filmmaker, given their popularity with moviegoers.
Instead, Gibney coolly musters expert opinions, eyewitness testimony of U.S. soldiers involved in interrogating detainees, official documents, and the public pronouncements of the architects of American interrogation policy (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo) to examine the rationalizations for the increasingly inhumane treatment of people who, at the time of their capture, haven’t been proven guilty of anything. It may have been the soldiers on the ground who were too vigourous in their application of interrogation techniques, but Gibney exposes how the tacit approval—indeed, the pressure—to extract information from “enemy combatants” by any means necessary came from the uppermost links in the chain of command. Naturally, only the soldiers were held culpable.
The gut-wrenching irony is that the intelligence derived from torture is often of little or no value because detainees will tell their interrogators whatever they want to hear to make the torture stop. When former Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN General Assembly there was irrefutable proof Saddam Hussein was training al-Qaeda prior to 9/11, he was repeating an untruth blurted out by a detainee during waterboarding, the controversial interrogation technique that simulates drowning. A few months later, that piece of “intelligence” was officially rescinded as having no basis in fact, even though various U.S. officials continued to uttered it in public.
To be sure, Gibney’s film is a very rough ride for the way it connects matters of policy to their horrific real-world impacts—policies that serve no purpose other than allowing politicians to look tough before a thoroughly terrified electorate. Even if time can somehow efface the cumulative blight of the Bush Jr. years, Taxi to the Dark Side will remain a haunting and profound warning against the dangers of answering evil with evil, couched though it may be in legalistic jargon and bland euphemism.
