Movie Review - 'Taxi to the Dark Side'

Taxi to the Dark Side

Directed by Alex Gibney
Rated R

The Oscar winner for Best Documentary this year, Taxi to the Dark Side strips back layers of fogged coverage about detainee abuse in American prison camps in Bagram, Abu Gharib and Guantanamo Bay. Rather than cover the subject broadly, director Alex Gibney narrows his focus on one case of torture in particular and laying the blame for an unjustified homicide at the feet of Vice President Cheney and former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld.

An Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar was taken into custody at Bagram, Afghanistan. Five days later, he was dead. It was the second detainee casualty in a week at the prison. In the years since his 2002 arrest, torture and death (ruled a homicide by Army medical examiners), Dilawar has become a symbol for those who want more answers and accountability from the Bush administration about their rules of conduct as it relates to prisoners in the war on terror, citing international law set down in the Geneva Conventions.

Gibney, who should have won an Academy Award for Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, has been directing and producing documentary films for nearly 30 years. In addition, his father served as a Navy interrogator during World War II and Korea, and the combination of those influences gives him more credibility in dealing with highly sensitive subject matter, but it also gives him unprecedented access to eyewitnesses, government officials, and military documents pertaining to Dilawar’s case as well as the conditions in Abu Gharib, which blew the lid off the entire scandal that has plagued the Bush White House for three years, and Guantanamo Bay.

However, there is more here than sensationalistic photojournalism (although there are incredibly graphic pictures and videos that are definitely not for everyone). Gibney digs inside the psychology of torture and interrogation, advancing plausible theories for why the military might use dogs and female MPs as weapons of humiliation against Islamic prisoners and how sensory depravation may be even crueler than physical torture.

To be sure, Taxi to the Dark Side pushes an overwhelmingly negative view of the Bush administration’s handling of detainees, many of whom, like Dilawar, were never charged with anything. And for the record, Dilawar was later cleared of suspicions of being an agent of al Qaeda; it is now believed that he was merely driving his taxi in front of the base at the wrong time.

And “The wrong time” has lasted far too long.