Mar 11th, 2008
New Releases
Taxi to the Dark Side
Directed by Alex Gibney
Reviewed by Sean Burns Opens Fri., Feb. 22
First the title: The taxi belonged to a poor bastard named Dilawar, who happened to be in the wrong part of Afghanistan at the wrong time. The “dark side” is where our esteemed Vice President Dick Cheney rather ominously informs Tim Russert, in a clip fromMeet the Press, that we’re going to have to work sometimes.
As for how dark—you’ve probably already had some inkling but decided you didn’t really want to know. After all, our Congress and the national news media spent more time last week worried about who injected what into Roger Clemens’ buttcheeks than on the question of waterboarding. But Alex Gibney’s horrifying documentary won’t let you look away, building to a staggering indictment of Bush-era POW abuse (or “enemy combatant abuse,” if you must) that’s full of evidence both barbaric and revolting. The movie made me physically sick.
Dilawar was an innocent man beaten and tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in Bagram Air Base Prison, and his was just the first of many cases to be deemed homicides over these past few years. (Predictably, initial news reports claimed that Dilawar died of natural causes.) Through some shocking interviews with the deceased’s disgraced interrogators, Gibney begins to uncover a larger, more insidious pattern of barely trained young men and women shoved into impossible situations with only the vaguest set of behavioral guidelines, but unbelievable pressure to produce results. It was only a matter of time, the movie argues, before Bagram led to Abu Ghraib.
Tags: blues, congressional, festival