Taxi To The Dark Side

Taxi To The Dark Side is an Alex Gibney documentary film released in 2007 about the culture of torture in the US military, with the death of a young, innocent Afghan taxi driver - Dilawar - in a prison in Bagram as the launching pad. It critically examines the grassroots interpretation of that wildly ambiguous term, the 'War on Terror'. Actually Taxi To The Dark Side is considerably more nuanced than that inadequate description gives credence to. It doesn't just name and shame the minor players in various torture scandals but follows the rabbit hole all the way up to the highest echelons, continually questioning the humanity and morality of an administration and military that risibly looked to ignore or quash any suggestion of torture in American Afghani imprisonment camps. It examines Bagram then Abu Ghraib and then to Guanatanamo Bay, highlighting the vacuum of accountability.

In short, this is a very effective documentary. It's cleverly composed, using the Dilawar case as a rudder with which to steer every line of argument and includes refreshingly frank interviews with a multitude of different characters up and down the spectrum of responsibility. That includes the Military Police and Intelligence Officers who carried out the physical torture. Gibney alters the perception that an audience would have of them; he manages to convincingly portray them as victims of the system that allowed, encouraged even, the implementation of debilitating physical interrogation methods. It's difficult to feel genuine compassion for them (they were all convicted by military tribunals) but it suspends knee-jerk condemnation and contextualises their plight in a wider political atmosphere - an atmosphere that demanded intelligence about Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda at all costs. These were nice people who were morally isolated from the outside world, working in a culture that passively encouraged the dehumanising of its Muslim inmates in a manner not unlike the Nazi officers of Jewish concentration camps or the Einsatzgruppen. 

Of course the most controversial bits involve Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and General's McNeil and Miller and their apathetic attitudes towards the endemic contraventions of the Geneva Convention that occurred under their authority. Even more sickening though are the brutal 'interrogation' techniques and the documents signed by those movers and shakers that acquiesced to those methods. Stress positions, sexual humiliation, sleep and sensory deprivation are all described in vivid detail. Interspersed throughout are excerpts from G.W. Bush speeches - there's no doubt that it's a deliberate mechanism designed to shock, to evoke disgust and it bloody works.

Gibney's Taxi To The Dark Side is unpleasantly effective in its shocking portrayal of goes on in the supposedly civilised twenty-first century. It doesn't even end on a positive note - Guantanamo Bay is a continuation of the treatment prevalent in Abu Ghraib because it falls between the judicial cracks of Cuba and America, it's not at the behest of any national law. They can get away with anything they want. Depressing stuff. Not least because Taxi To The Dark Side received high exposure - it won a Best Documentary Oscar - and Gitmo continues to thrive despite vast worldwide outrage. Evidently there's no way of forcing closure through legal channels (Obama has twice promised and twice failed to ensure its termination).