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: - Exceptional Documentary That Focuses On Everyone Involved Post 9/11
I often complain about the lopsidedness of documentaries. And more often than not, whenever I mention this, people pepper me with insults because they believe "that's what documentaries are designed to do." I beg to differ. Let me show you what I mean.

There are some seriously stilted documentaries that look at one side (and ONLY one side) of an issue and never give credence to the other. How about an interview with someone who opposes the views that the documentarians are putting forth? ... Read More
Rating: - Shining a light in "dark" places
This was an excellent documentary. The film covered the United States' recent torture of civilian population inthe Afghanistan and Iraq areas as well as the Guantanamo Bay detainees. Be warned, this documentary has some very graphic material, such as images of men being forces to masturbate and other types of psychological torture.
I found the movie to be pretty consistent with what I have read, it is really the polar opposite of such feel good stories such as "Three Cups of Tea." If you want ... Read More
Rating: - What about individual responsibility?
This is a fascinating documentary that shows how the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration allowed the torture and murder of detainees to happen (and they should be held accountable for this), but I found it disturbing how the makers of this documentary portrayed the military personnel who were actually responsible for the death of Dilawar (and were held accountable) so sympathetically.Yes, the rules of Bagram were not clear and the personnel were not properly trained, but beating a person to "a pulp" ... Read More
Rating: - TRAGIC
I am amazed this film survived U.S., British and Israeli intelligence censorship. Evidently when pressure is applied to politicians they will give up their morals rather than give up their political careers. It's not uncommon for blame to flow downhill. Having served in the armed forces I am not amazed at what happened. Blind revenge seems to be the driving force for people's inhumanity to man and after 10,000 years of continuous religious war mankind has still not learned that this kind of thinking does ... Read More
Rating: - One-sided, poorly researched hatchet job
Don't listen to the praise that the "professional" film critics heap on this poorly researched "documentary" that is a purely one-sided presentation of its opinions. Film critics get their jobs, after all, because they're incompetent journalists or screenwriters. Documentary filmmakers get their jobs because they wouldn't survive in broadcast journalism or Hollywood. No effort is made by director Alex Gibney to present any opposing viewpoint (and filming a New York Times reporter typing on a laptop does not ... Read More