Review 3

American Ideals exposed in Taxi to the Dark Side
Marni Newell
1/26/09

Lack of concrete directions, convenient oversights, and an extra dosage of self-justification occurs at all levels of the American bureaucracy in “Taxi to the Dark Side.” The documentary by Alex Gibney details modern American torture through the story of one small-town Afghani taxi driver, Dilawar, who was falsely accused of terrorism and tortured at the hands of American soldiers.

As told by his family in the start of the documentary, Dilawar grew up on a farm and planned to bring the “meat and potatoes” back to his family through his work in the city as a taxi driver. Before he could bring back anything, however, Dilawar and his passengers were accused of acts of terrorism dealing with rockets. The details of their crime are, even to the soldiers who abused him, murky at best. This doesn’t stop the soldiers at Bagram Air Base from following orders, which include hours of forced standing, sleep deprivation, demoralization, and beating the prisoners—as long as it is below the waist and using their knees.

By the time Dilawar died, he looked, according to coroners, as if he had been “pulpified.” And, as the documentary continues, it becomes apparent that he was not the only one to receive this treatment nor that those were the only techniques the soldiers used.

The soldiers interviewed in the documentary sit in a dark room with a single light shining on the side of their face, allowing the shadows to symbolize their violent, seemingly inhuman alter ego. But, as their soft-spoken justifications and admissions of guilt continue, they seem more a tool of the wrong-headed Bush Administration than individual murderers. In this way, Gibney succeeds in conveying the drama of the subject matter without compromising the weight of their hellacious deeds or making scapegoats of the soldiers. Through a delicate balance of shocking inhumanity at the soldier and administration level, Gibney shows the blame is not easily placed. One soldier describes Afghani’s as “very frail people” and he was “surprised it took [Dilawar] that long to die,” and later, Gibney shows a hand-written note by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld asking why the prisoners only have to stand for four hours when he stands at his desk eight-to-ten hours a day.

By the middle of the documentary, it’s hard to tell which is more disgusting, the actual torture, or the self-justification of the soldiers and administration about the torture. In one of the most shocking lines of the film, a soldier who had tortured men at Bagram says, “If I had to do it again, I’d probably say no.” Probably?

One might breathe a sigh of relief with recent decisions by the Obama Administration to close Guantanamo Bay and redefine the treatment guidelines of suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, but those who’ve seen Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side” know the ambiguous workings of the government and bureaucracy are rarely conclusive, and sometimes not even in conjunction with the Geneva Convention. Most of the time, politicians seem to be arguing the definition of “torture,” than actually protecting human rights. Through careful editing Gibney allows “Taxi to the Dark Side” to be both illuminating and horrifying but stops before it becomes too accusatory, letting the message resonate without smothering.