REVIEW: Taxi to the Dark Side

By Philip Martin (Contact)

Afghan detainees are walked to a helicopter after a village raid in Taxi to the Dark Side. 2008-05-08 10:41:00

LITTLE ROCK — Written and directed by Alex Gibney, Taxi to the Dark Side calls to mind the Bob Dylan song “Who Killed Davey Moore?” In that song, Dylan uses the death of a fighter in the ring to raise questions about a society that embraces blood sport as entertainment. In Taxi, the death of an Afghan taxi driver while in U.S. custody illuminates how fear can corrode a nation’s moral armor.

Winner of the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary, Taxi is a sober-sided and depressing exploration of cruelties and abuses committed by U.S. military and intelligence personnel in the extrajudicial detainment scheme established under cover of the Bush administration’s “Global War on Terror.” It begins with the story of cabdriver Dilawar, being held at the Bagram Collection Point, a military detention facility run by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in December 2002.

Taxi to the Dark Side

9.1

Rating: R

Length: 1 hour, 46 minutes

More info on: Taxi to the Dark Side

Dilawar and three passengers in his taxi were turned over to the U.S. Army by Afghan militiamen who were paid a bounty for rounding up terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. Dilawar was chained, often by his hands to a grate at the top of his cell, and deprived of sleep by his captors, who repeatedly struck him in the back of the knee - an action that caused Dilawar to scream “Allah,” which one of the guards interviewed by Gibney for the film says amused some of his keepers.

Three days into his captivity, Bagram prison personnel determined that Dilawar was innocent, but the soldiers continued to beat his legs. When a doctor arrived on Dilawar’s fifth day in captivity, he found the prisoner chained in his cell, dead. Though a pathologist determined that Dilawar had died from “blunt-force injuries to lower extremities” that exacerbated a pre-existing heart condition and characterized it as a homicide on the death certificate, the U.S. governmentpublicly claimed that the death was from natural causes.

Gibney interviews soldiers implicated in Dilawar’s death and discovers not monsters, but young people ashamed and confused by their capacity for cruelty and their government’s willingness to sacrifice their lives and careers when, by their lights, they were only following orders to soften up and break down these presumedenemies of the American way of life. Most of the military police who came in contact with Dilawar weren’t trained as interrogators or even as prison guards - they were pawns of an idea enunciated by Vice President Dick Cheney to Tim Russert on Meet the Press five days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks:

“

We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful. That’s the world these folks operate in, and so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

Gibney establishes a paper trail through the offices of men like Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld andformer Justice Department official John Yoo that establishes an intellectually dubious superlegal system of dealing with terror suspects.

Tap-dancing around the definition of “torture,” U.S. policy apparently admits to some forms of physical abuse as well as mind-smashing psychological techniques such as sexual humiliation, sleep and sensory deprivation and the exploitation of culturally specific fears and taboos. Operating beyond the scope of the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law, the architects of the policy sought and received from Congress immunity for top officials in the Bush administration from ever being held legally accountable for their actions. (These provisions don’t extend to boots-onthe-ground soldiers.)

While obviously the details are selectively presented, Taxi is all the more effective for its lack of hysteria. It isn’t a finger-pointing song so much as a lament for the death of character - the quality that permits us to follow our principles despite our fears.

MovieStyle, Pages 41 on 05/09/2008