Taxi To the Dark Side

Product Description:
Director alex gibney investigates the torture & killing of an onnocent afghani taxi driver in this gripping probe into reckless abuses of government power.Studio: Image EntertainmentRelease Date: 09/30/2008Run time: 106 minutesRating: R

Amazon.com:
Among the slew of documentaries inspired by the post-9/11 war, arguably none is more important than Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side. The story it has to tell, with compelling thoroughness and no recourse to rhetoric, should be as disturbing to Americans supporting the war as it is to opponents. In December 2002, Dilawar, a young rural Afghan cabdriver, was accused of helping to plan a rocket attack on a U.S. base, clamped into prison at Bagram, and subjected to physical torture so relentless that he died after two days of it. But Dilawar was innocent--and he'd been denounced by the real culprit, who thereby took the heat off himself and won points with U.S. forces by giving them "a bad guy." Dilawar was the first fatal victim of Vice President Dick Cheney's devotion to "working the dark side"--torturing, humiliating, and otherwise abusing prisoners in the "Global War on Terror." His story, developed in horrific detail with testimony from the soldiers who tortured him, and also from two New York Times investigative reporters, becomes a prism for slanting light onto the "dark side" policy and the mindset behind it. The program at Bagram was deemed such a success that it served as the model for Abu Graibh the following year in Iraq, and both prisons became pipelines to the detainee facility at Guantánamo, Cuba.

The film's impact is powerful and complex. We come to see the very soldiers who broke Dilawar's body and spirit as victims, too--and patsies of a policy that, from Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on down, ignored the Geneva Convention and shrouded itself (and commanding officers) in "a fog of ambiguity" while the grunts took the fall. A lot of these grunts testify here, and the accumulation of their individual perspectives on a shared tragedy is devastating. The latter half of the film features penetrating commentary from critics of torture as a policy (Senator John McCain was still one at the time), all of whom agree that it doesn't work and it only damages us. And for Theatre of the Absurd, there's a PR tour of (a discrete portion of) the Guantánamo facility, which turns out to be kinda like summer camp: "They get ice cream on Sundays." Finally, Taxi to the Dark Side isn't about torture or politics or the justness or unjustness of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Gibney is entirely correct when he says, "It's really about the American character and whether we have become something rather different from what we imagine ourselves to be." He's asking; he doesn't want it to be true.--Richard T. Jameson

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Customer Reviews

Rating: - Do They Really Want It Hidden?
Yes, the torture depicted in this film is an embarrassment and a possible war crime.Yes, the Administration under whose auspices it occurred seems to relish secrecy above all else.And yet, one has to wonder if perhaps there was a reason to let it be revealed which overrode all the reasons for keeping it hidden.Namely, to de-sensitize the American public to the very idea of torture.The fact that as much as 40% of the American people "approve" of torture is not a statistic to be taken lightly. ... Read More
Rating: - Required Viewing for Every American
Quite simply the most important documentary made in recent years.

Here is the true shame of the Bush administration -- the complete disregard for the Geneva Conventions in the prosecution of the "war on terror".

Most shocking of all is the revelation that one of the key pieces of "intelligence" on which Colin Powell based his rationale for the Iraq War was false, the claim of a prisoner tortured into confessing what his captors wanted to hear.

Powell states that ... Read More
Rating: - prosecutable war crimes
On December 5, 2002, an Afghan taxi driver named Diliwar was taken to America's prison at the Bagram Air Force Base. Five days later he was dead. At first the military said that he had died of "natural causes," but in a later inquiry the coroner testified that his lower body had been "pulpified." On his death certificate issued by the military the box marked "homicide" was checked. Taxi to the Dark Side won an Academy Award as best documentary for portraying detainee abuse and torture at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, ... Read More
Rating: - "God Mend Thy Every Flaw"/"Do the Ends Justify the Means?"
`Taxi to the Dark Side' is an eye-opener.Starting with the case of Dilawar, a taxi driver from Afghanistan, the documentary traces the lives of terrorist suspects imprisoned in Bagram in Afghanistan; Abu Graib in Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba.Showing ample evidence of beatings and abuse, the film has several photographs and much testimony with which to work.

Among the interviewees are some of the suspects who were either court marshaled or imprisoned for their offenses when the scandal ... Read More
Rating: - the horror
"Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one."
Friedrich Nietzsche

Well that quote came to mind as I watched this depressing 2007 Academy Award Winner directed by Alex Gibney (ENRON: THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM -also excellent). This time Gibney explores America's journey into darkness that is the so-called "war on terror" (BTW people, when you hear the words "war on" before anything you can bet it is a total disaster.). I was reminded of Nietzsche's warning and then of ... Read More