Taxi to the Dark Side DVD (15)

Dir: Alex Gibney, 2007, USA, 106mins

As with his ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM (2005), Taxi to the Dark Side is another Alex Gibney film that exposes perversions at the heart of American life. In Enron it was the iniquity of free-market capitalism run wild. In Taxi… it is America’s fall from grace as an abuser of the Geneva Conventions and a state-sanctioned torture.

Using the story of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver who was detained following a rocket attack on a US post, Gibney uncovers the truth. It was later discovered that the Afghan militia-man who had arrested him was also responsible for the rocket attack. Dilawar was taken to Bagram Prison, where five days later he was declared dead.

Gibney interviews guards and interrogators at Bagram, a fellow prisoner (the British citizen later freed from Guantánamo, Moazzam Begg), the two New York Times journalists who prevented Dilawar’s story from sliding into obscurity, and assorted federal agents, legal counsels and Justice Department officials. What emerges from these dialogues is an incontrovertible rebuttal of the ‘bad apple’ theory the Bush administration put forward after conditions at Abu Ghraib were revealed.

This theory contends that individual guards – Private Lynndie England, for example – were responsible for the cruelties inflicted on prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Bagram: prisoners forced to masturbate while wearing women’s underwear on their heads; prisoners sexually assaulted by female interrogators; prisoners forced to stand for extended periods of time; forced to urinate and defecate on themselves; bombarded with punishingly loud rock music; surrounded with barking dogs; repeatedly kicked and punched; and prisoners subjected to waterboarding, a procedure that leads the victim to believe that they are drowning.

What Gibney’s film shows is that far from a few bad apples, strategies employed at Guantánamo and Bagram migrated to Abu Ghraib as accepted, normal procedure. Sensory deprivation has long been proven as a method of breaking down a human’s resistance. That such procedures contravene the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war is, to the Bush administration, a legal issue to be circumvented rather than a moral line not to be crossed. That this is a fact rather than an assertion is proven by the willing participation in the film of John Yoo, a State Department official who wrote legal opinions justifying the use of torture techniques on suspected members of Al-Qaeda.

Gibney plays it straight as a documentary filmmaker. His own presence is limited to an occasional off-camera question and a short but pointed comment from his own father (a US naval interrogator in World War II and Korea) accompanying the closing credits. Rather than engage in dramatisation or eye-catching stylistic adornments, the director makes the brave and wise decision to produce a film as visually uncluttered as possible. While on one level this makes Taxi to the Dark Side an uncinematic experience, it promotes the integrity and power of Gibney’s argument, which his intelligence as a filmmaker prevents from ever becoming a rant. Instead, his film is an important document that will, if there’s any justice at all (a notion which, it should be said, this film makes one seriously doubt), come to represent the lowest moral ebb of a morally bankrupt administration.

Extras:
Includes Audio Commentary by Alex Gibney

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Chris Power