Film Review: Taxi to the Dark Side

 Taxi Driver Missing in the Fog of War

On December 5, 2002 an Afghan taxi driver took three passengers for a ride and never returned home. He was brought to Bagram Air Base where he was detained by U.S. military forces, then in action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda forces.  Bagram had been turned into a prison to hold and interrogate people captured in this first aggressive action in the War on Terror. Five days after his arrival Dilawar was dead.

From Victim to Victimizer

Taxi to the Dark Side, a searching, and meditative film, is a thoughtful inquiry by documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (director of Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room), of the route the U.S. took after 9/11 from attack victim to torturer.

Combining still photos, interviews with service people who carried out some of this abuse (and were court martialled for them), videos of prison cells in Abu Graib, Bagram and Guantanamo,  Gibney asks the hard questions:  How did this happen? How did the U.S., ( a signatory to the Geneva Conventions) end up committing torture, and justifying those actions?

Interviews with Soldiers Who Were There

Gibney spends considerable time with military police who acted as interrogators and soldiers responsible for carrying out their orders to keep prisoners awake and in stress positions.  You begin to appreciate what it was like to be a soldier in these conditions, unprepared for the tasks they were assigned, overwhelmed by a hostile culture they did not understand.  Says one soldier,

            “You put people in crazy situations and they do crazy things.”

Says another,

            “You are told they are less than dogs, and all of a sudden you are doing things you would never have dreamed of doing.”

Subsequent investigations revealed that Dilawar, a man with no ties to the Taliban or Al Qaeda, was repeatedly beaten on his legs until they were pulpified and died from complications related to this trauma. The U. S. Army has now determined that 105 deaths of detainees have occurred during the past seven years and of those, 37 have been declared homicides.

On the Torture Trail

Gibney traces how the techniques improvised at Bagram, found their way to Abu Graib.  When the abuses of Abu Graib were revealed to a shocked public, these degrading acts were excused as the actions of a “few bad apples.” No commanding officer has ever been held accountable for inhumane actions and for torture either at Bagram or at Abu Graib.

Revenge in Action

This is a shocking film and it’s hard to watch. It’s also one that anyone who cares about democracy must watch.  After 9/11 Vice-President Cheney declared on a Meet the Press program that the “gloves were coming off” and that we, in the U.S., were going to have to go to the “dark side.”  It is now clear that a thirst for revenge ruled American policy during the Bush years and that our highest leaders acted impulsively, rather than thoughtfully and carefully, about the implications of their actions for the future.

Can the Stain on our Honor be Removed?

 Of 83,000 people detained since Sept. 11, 200,  less than 1% have been terrorists.  If even a portion of these were treated with cruelty, how many of them will go on to support terrorism in some form?  American values have long been premised on the sanctity of the individual, as if we are more moral than the rest of the world

 We are not—and the whole world knows it.  How do we remove the stain on our honor?

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