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"Taxi to the Dark Side." Written, directed, and
narrated by Alex Gibney.
In
2005, director Alex Gibney brought the exigencies of corporate greed
into the open with his documentary, "Enron: the Smartest Guys in
the Room." His powerful new film, "Taxi to the Dark
Side," uncompromisingly exposes the torture tactics of the Bush
administration, as it floods with light the "dark side" of
U.S. policies regarding prisoner interrogation at Afghanistan’s Bagram
Air Base, Iraq’s Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Gibney
bravely includes damning archival footage of interviews, meetings, and
news-show interviews with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, and Powell,
along with many active and retired high-ranking military and government
officials.
The
phrase "dark side" was lifted from the "Star Wars"
films by Cheney in both an interview on Sept. 16, 2001 [shown in the
film], and to a Newsweek reporter in the Nov. 21, 2005, issue. When
asked about information-gathering techniques used on al-Queda terrorism
suspects, Cheney sneered condescendingly:
“We
also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We've
got to 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. That's the
world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us to
use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective."
In
"Taxi," Gibney focuses on the tragic fate of Dilawar, an
innocent Afghan taxi driver who was arrested in Afghanistan,
imprisoned, and, within five days, found dead in his cell. Three years later, the cause of
death was officially declared a homicide, signed off on by a
top-ranking military medical inspector.
Dilawar
decided the family farm wasn’t quite up his alley, so he bought himself
a used van to take people into town, a small village down several miles
of dirt road. He was 22, a slight man, about 120 pounds and just over
five feet tall.
In
December 2002, when the U.S. was bombing Afghanistan, the U.S.
administration told the Afghan and Pakistani governments and pro-U.S.
warlords that whoever brought in a Taliban suspect would receive a
couple thousand dollars. Needless to say, that same month, hundreds of
innocent men and boys were swept up.
As
part of the campaign, Dilawar and two passengers were hauled from his
taxi, stripped, and tossed into a former warehouse-turned-prison at
Bagram Air Base. His mug shot shows a terror-stricken man.
Five
days later, guards found Dilawar lying motionless in his cell. He was
dead. They tried to revive him.
Another prisoner had died the day before from beatings by
guards. When Dilawar died, they knew they were in deep trouble (in June
2004, Human Rights Watch reported that at least five prisoner deaths
occurred there between 2002-2003).
A
guard who was interviewed by the filmmaker drew a crude stick figure of
Dilawar, hooded, in chains, hanging from the ceiling for several days
and nights, in average daily temperatures of 148 degrees Fahrenheit.
As
Dilawar hung from the ceiling of his wire cage, his legs were beaten so
badly that the skin covering them ended up as bruised, bloody sacks
holding a mass of broken flesh and fragmented bones. The guards had
literally beaten his legs to a pulp. One investigator said that they
looked like they were repeatedly run over by a truck.
An
initial report stated that he had died of natural causes. But a final
death certificate was issued in early October 2003 that clearly states
his death as a homicide. Dilawar’s taxi passengers were released after
two years of suffering abuses at Bagram. At the time, Sergeant Carolyn Wood was head of
Bagram. Her superior officer
ordered her to instruct her guards to "rough up prisoners,"
make them out to be less than human in their eyes. Later, transferred
to Abu Ghraib, she brought her Bagram techniques with her. She was made
a captain and awarded a Medal of Honor.
Gibney
includes clips of former defense chief Rumsfeld signing off on Deputy
Assistant Attorney General John Woo’s “torture memo,“ written on Sept.
25, 2001 [available at www.usdoj.gov/olc/warpowers925.htm],
which basically throws out the Geneva Convention guidelines for
treatment of prisoners of war. Woo rationalized that so-called
terrorists are non-uniformed, enemy combatants and not part of any
official government or standing army, so the Geneva Convention did not
apply.
The
memo was approved by Alberto Gonzales, with a handwritten notation by
Donald Rumsfeld referencing the stress position of standing for hours
on end. His notation said something like, what‘s the big deal? "I
stand at my desk up to eight hours a day."
When
Rumsfeld was questioned at a congressional hearing about the techniques
shown in the photos from Abu Ghraib, he claimed neither to recall
signing the memo nor adding the notation. One official stated,
"One by one, the terrorists are learning the meaning of American
Justice."
When
the heavily-censored pictures of prisoner abuse were released to the
media in April 2005, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld appeared surprised and
shocked that such practices were conducted. Bush and Rumsfeld were
asked in press conferences about the Abu Ghraib pictures; Bush came
back with, "We don’t torture," and Rumsfeld whined about
"a few bad apples."
Gibney
pulls no punches. In his film, he includes not only uncensored stills,
but video and camera-phone clips taken by guards, as well. The most
infamous are of Pfc. Lynndie England holding a prisoner by a leash
around his neck, and one of her grinning as she points to the genitals
of hooded, naked prisoners standing in a line outside their cells.
What
wasn’t seen in the major commercial media is a clip of Spc. Sabrina
Harman, basically forcing detainees to masturbate in front of her.
Guards took sickening, graphically detailed videos of hooded prisoners
forming naked human pyramids, being threatened by rabid dogs, standing
with arms outstretched for hours, and/or on boxes with wires attached.
Fortunately, we are spared sound. Another clip shows a prisoner driven
to such an extreme that he beats his head against a metal door until he
crumples unconscious to the floor.
At
Bagram, Sgt. Damien Corsetti, a huge dome-headed hulk, told the
filmmaker that their only qualifications as interrogators were size and
a menacing appearance. He confessed that they had absolutely no
training in interrogation techniques, adding that soldiers went along
with the abuse because they tend to obey orders.
They
were told the prisoners were enemy combatants and their treatment was
not subject to the Geneva Convention guidelines. A few soldiers had
moral issues, he said, but didn’t want to speak out and appear
treasonous to their buddies.
After
a while, Gibney narrates, military psychologists were brought in to
train guards in techniques guaranteed to break a prisoner in less than
a week: total sensory-deprivation, continuous loud erratic music,
bright lights day and night, cold water sprayed on them in freezing
temperatures—which caused one recorded death—and the compromising of
prisoners’ moral, religious, or cultural convictions. Among many such
tactics, female interrogators invaded the prisoners’ space and assumed
sexual positions with them.
Though
these crimes can be traced up the chain of command, according to a
footnoted article on Salon.com, from March 2006, no officers have been
court-martialed so far. However, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski,
commander at Abu Ghraib, was relieved of command, demoted to colonel,
officially reprimanded (she was not court-martialed). Those of lesser
rank have been prosecuted for the deaths or torture of prisoners at Bagram,
Abu Grhaib, or Guantanamo.
There
were nine convictions of U.S. soldiers stationed at Abu Ghraib,
including Lynndie England and her boyfriend, Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr.
Those still to be tried and found guilty of war crimes include
President George W. Bush; Vice President Dick Cheney; former Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and former Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales.
“Taxi
to the Dark Side” won an Oscar at the 2007 Academy Awards Ceremony in
February for Best Documentary Film. In his acceptance speech, Gibney
said, raising his Oscar in salute: "This is dedicated to two
people who are no longer with us: Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi
driver, and my father, a Navy interrogator, who urged me to make this
film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law.
Let’s hope we can turn this country around and move away from the dark
side and back to the light."
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