A few days
after 9/11, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet The Press, and when asked about the magnitude of America's
response to the terrorist threat, he said, "We also have to work through, 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." Half the title
of Alex Gibney's Oscar-winning documentary Taxi To The Dark Side derives from Cheney's diabolical statement, while
the "taxi" part refers to the story of Dilawar, an innocent rural Afghan cabbie
tortured to death by American soldiers while he was detained at Bagram Air Base
in 2002. In what would become standard operating procedure (see also: Standard
Operating Procedure), a few "bad apples"
were reprimanded for working in shadows that Cheney and other higher-ups had consciously
created.
Having honed
his investigative skills on documentaries like The Trials Of Henry Kissinger and Enron: The Smartest People In The Room, Gibney gets an impressive number of people on
record, from those MPs directly involved in Dilawar's case to the men in
Washington who helped formulate (and others who fought) interrogation standards
that left a lot of room for interpretation. Gibney sees Dilawar's murder in
Bagram as part of a virus that spread to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, where
soldiers have enacted various forms of physical and psychological torture in
the absence of a specific code of conduct. (Like, you know, the Geneva
Conventions.) By anchoring the film to one case, Gibney allows himself the
freedom to reach out and explore the larger forces behind this toxic policy
while still tying it to specific victims like Dilawar and the soldiers who
carried it out. With the torture issue off the table on the campaign trail this
year—even John McCain, one of the film's heroes, has kept his
distance—Taxi To The Dark Side
is a reminder of the moral blight the next president will inherit.
Key features: A Gibney commentary track joins an overrun of
interviews and outtakes.