Taxi to the Dark Side
Written and directed by Alex Gibney
THINKFilm
2008
Rating:


Five days after Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on "Meet the Press" and said that in order to defeat the terrorists, the U.S. has to work "the dark side" and "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."

On Dec. 5, 2002, Afghan taxi driver Dilawar learned just what that dark side was when he was held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan under suspicion of being the getaway driver for terrorists who attacked an American military camp that morning. Dilawar was tortured for five days before dying from blunt-force trauma to the legs. The military examiner ruled Dilawar's death a homicide. Dilawar's passengers were held in Guantánamo Bay for another year. None of them were ever officially charged with a crime.

With the same restrained outrage he brought to his "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney uses "Taxi to the Dark Side" to investigate the human rights violations that have been at least "unofficially" sanctioned with a wink and a nod by the Bush administration for the War on Terrorism. Gibney uses Dilawar's death as a jumping off point to examine the acts of torture committed in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.

What Gibney details is a Kafkaesque nightmare for those imprisoned in U.S. camps: most of the detainees, like Dilawar, are arrested without substantial evidence by Afghans looking to collect a bounty, and who are never actually charged by American military police.

"Taxi" also depicts a national spiritual crisis. There was a public outcry when the infamous Abu Ghraib photos went public, but tactics such as waterboarding continue to be practiced, and the nation's rage has been quelled. Gibney places part of the blame for a national acceptance of torture on "24" because that show makes it seem extreme tactics are necessary, even though never in the nation's history has there been a "ticking bomb" threat.

With even more success than Charles Ferguson's Iraq War summary "No End in Sight" (which Gibney executive produced), "Taxi" riles up a nation's moral indignation. Thorough, fair and damning, "Taxi" is one of the more essential films in the ever-expanding catalogue of documentaries about the Global War on Terror and Iraq.

Posted Saturday, February 2, 2008

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/film/taxi.to.the.dark.side