FLICKS: Taxi To The Dark Side
Powerfully and artistically constructed, sometimes difficult to watch, Taxi to the Dark Side won the Academy Award for best documentary, and the honor was well deserved.
by Chris Dashiell- The Film Snob
Once in a great while a film comes out that's not just good, but important—important in how it addresses fundamental questions and issues of the time. In recent years such films have been documentaries, more often than not, works designed to wake us up to reality. Opening this weekend is such a film—it's called Taxi to the Dark Side, and it's directed by Alex Gibney. The subject is torture, specifically how this practice, considered illegal and immoral by civilized people for generations, became U.S. policy under the regime of George W. Bush.
Taxi to the Dark Side takes as a starting point the story of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar who was caught in the war's anti-terrorist sweep in 2002 and taken to the Bagram prison. He died there, beaten to death by American soldiers. They kicked his legs until they turned to pulp—he would have required amputation if he had lived. Exploring this early homicide, the film introduces the various elements that would be consistent throughout the torture scandals—shackling, stress positions, nudity and sexual humiliation, dogs, sensory and sleep deprivation, severe beatings, and of course water boarding, among others. The soldiers who killed Dilawar were eventually court-martialed. Gibney interviews them, and shows conclusively that they acted with the tacit approval of their superiors, with vague or non-existent guidelines, and little or no training. The strategy came right from the top—Vice-President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld specifically authorized torture, as the film proves, despite all the phony denials and prevarications.
The film goes on to detail the entire horrifying progression, from Bagram to the infamous Abu Ghraib in Iraq, to the U.S. base in Guantanamo. With exhaustive thoroughness, using interviews, first-hand accounts and documents, the film exposes all the lies and excuses such as the idea that these were just a few bad apples doing this—false, or the ticking time-bomb argument (the notion that torture would be justified because a terrorist might know where a bomb is about to go off), which is shown as absurd. Another thing that Bush and company are shown saying is how bad and evil these prisoners are, as if that excused us from violating our values. But in fact, as the film shows, less than 5% of prisoners were actually captured by U.S. forces. The rest were brought in by foreigners, sometimes for large amounts of money. The taxi driver, Dilawar, was turned in by a Northern Alliance militia man who was actually responsible for rocket attacks on the base. Dilawar was innocent.
The "dark side" of the title refers to Dick Cheney's statement on Meet the Press that we need to work on the dark side to fight terrorism. Gibney demonstrates that such a policy is a failure in terms of intelligence, a betrayal of our humanity, and a national disgrace. Powerfully and artistically constructed, sometimes difficult to watch, Taxi to the Dark Side won the Academy Award for best documentary, and the honor was well deserved.
Chris (the Film Snob) produces the weekly mini-program "Flicks" exclusively for 91.3FM KXCI. Tune in Mondays at 8:00PM and Fridays at 10:00AM and 3:00PM. For more writings from the Film Snob visit www.cinecene.com
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