billcr12 Taxi to the Dark Side explores America's fight against terrorism with troubling conclusions. The film deals with the interrogation and torture policies of the United States. The focus is on a taxi driver named Diliwar, who was abducted and endured a Kafka-esque nightmare of inhuman treatment at the hands of a few people who belong in jail for the rest of their natural lives. Dilawar was a twenty two year old man who weighed 122 pounds. He was chained to a wall with his arms in an upright position. A hood was placed over his head to restrict breathing, and the sadists punched him in the abdomen and struck him at his knee caps over one hundred times. He was kicked in the groin and deprived of sleep. He died within five days. The autopsy showed that the severe beatings had pulpified his legs to the point that had he survived, his legs would have been amputated. The documentary is chilling, and a must viewing for anyone working for the Pentagon. As an American, I am ashamed of the conduct of our self appointed guardians of liberty, as they destroy our reputation around the world. Thank You, Alex Gibney for your courage in seeking the truth.

Michael_Elliott Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) **** (out of 4) Excellent, Oscar-winning documentary taking a look at the use of torture during the Bush administration. The documentary takes a look at a couple men who were beaten to death at the Bagram Prison including an Afghan taxi driver who picked up three passengers and was never heard of again until he was murdered inside the prison. Throughout the documentary we get interviews with experts on torture, journalists who broke the story and also with actual soldiers who were involved with the torture. Director Alex Gibney does a terrific job at looking at everything involved in this including the political and moral sides of it. The torture aspect is something that there are so many rules around that it would seem like an obvious thing not to do but we then learn about various loopholes that were used so that terrorists could be abused in order to get more information about terror plots. We also get to know how many of the soldiers who were arrested were made to look like bad apples yet they said they were just following orders. The documentary takes a look at all the torture acts ranging from water boarding, sexual humiliations and of course the actual physical abuse. The film shows some pretty graphic photos and videos so those squeamish will certainly want to be prepared to look away from the screen. The documentary is broken into several different segments with each looking at a different aspect of the story. One of the most interesting pieces involves the taxi driver because it turned out he was an innocent man who had no connection to terrorism. The documentary is one that really makes you think because if you go into it feeling that terrorists do deserve to be tortured, you're quickly reminded that several innocent people were being tortured and killed. The film even admits that many people believe that torture should be allowed under certain circumstances. TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE is a very disturbing documentary that shows some ugly images and makes you wonder who was in charge of all of this stuff. It's not an easy film to sit through but it's worth watching and discussing.

melwyn The Nuremburg trials left us two legacies. First, no matter what your rank, you are responsible for your actions. As one Nazi after another said, "I was just following orders", we made it clear this was no excuse for war crimes. Second, given the winners get to write history, we have a deluded mindset that war crimes are things other people commit, not us.Alex Gibney has tried to send a message about America's hypocritical sacrifice of longstanding principles by focusing on a single man, a taxi driver tortured to death by American forces in Afghanistan. This focus never allows us to forget that these victims are people just like us, and they are the victims of terrible crimes for which no one has been held accountable.Gibney reveals how high up knowledge and sanction of these crimes goes. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfield are directly responsible for the official policy allowing torture, increasing the number of people who have never faced war crimes charges but should do so.It is confronting, saddening and maddening to watch. But what undermines Gibney's effort is that he doesn't give us the full context. Instead he allows the soldiers' own words to absolve them of responsibility by allowing claims of "just following orders" to go unchallenged. Worse, he allows the miserable excuse of being "poorly trained", as if an adult needs to be told that torturing people, especially people they know are innocent, is wrong.This is a cop-out. Our failed humanitarian intervention in Somalia revealed that torturing civilians (often to death) for sport and photographing it is a popular hobby among many military forces, and those of many Western democracies including the US are no exception. Yet we insist on seeing them as one-off instances of "a few bad apples" out of control, rather than an indication of a systemic, ingrained culture that urgently needs to be dealt with. All Bush and Co did was sanction activities many soldiers were already engaging in, but Gibney cannot or will not acknowledge this.I can't fault his technical skills, it's methodical and well-edited. But I cannot add "well researched" or "thorough". By not giving us the broader context and by not looking at the culture that encourages war crimes among US soldiers, he let these guys off lightly.

Robert J. Maxwell Anybody see "Cool Hand Luke" (1967) with Paul Newman as an inmate at a small southern prison camp? That's the one in which a guard tells Luke, "You got to get your mind right." A gripping movie, comic and then tragic. The guards, led by the pock-faced "man with no eyes", are real mean mothers. For infractions of the rules or any sassy backtalk, they lock Luke up in "the box", an upright wooden shelter the size of a one-hole outhouse, with only a pail for company. He's held there in the blistering heat for 24 hours. When Luke gets more uppity they simply beat hell out of him.Well, all of that is peanuts compared to what went on in our detainee camps at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Gitmo -- not to mention the CIA-maintained black holes in countries known around the world for their humane treatment of prisoners, such as Egypt and Bulgaria.The detainees at Bagram and Abu Ghraib -- only 10 percent of whom were picked up by coalition forces, the rest being turned over to us by Afghanis or Pakinstanis, sometimes for bounty -- were not subject to any questioning before being thrown into solitary confinement and held there not for 24 hours, like Luke, but for weeks. They were shackled to the ceiling, forced to assume stress positions, beaten on the legs, waterboarded and forced to undergo many of the other horrors we associate with the Inquisition.But that's an old story by now. This film doesn't really tell us much that we hadn't known or guessed, except that it was worse than we imagined. It begins and ends with the case of Dilawar, a taxi driver who left his family to drive to the provincial capitol and show off his new car and wound up in Bagram where he was killed -- one of 37 homicides so far acknowledged by the US Army. His legs were "pulpified" according to the Army's medical examiner.There are three fundamental issues involved in the application of enhanced interrogation techniques. (1) Do they work? (2) Are they moral? (3) Are they legal? "Taxi to the Dark Side", for most of its length, seems to focus on the first question. Does torture work? Well, no it doesn't.That is to say, it's worthless if your goal is to get accurate information out of your subjects. But it may be well worthwhile if your aim to exact revenge upon people who look like the lunatics who flew airplanes into the WTC in 2001, people who speak the same language and come from the same area, the Middle East. Boy, are those Middle East folks alien to us. The language sounds like they're clearing their throats. They wear tablecloths on their heads. They dream of 72 virgins in Paradise. If you want revenge, these are your targets alright. I doubt that one out of a hundred Americans could walk up to a blank map on the wall and put his finger on Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Syria. We don't know anything about geography but we know what we don't like.The enlisted men who were tried for some of the crimes and interviewed for this film wouldn't say exactly that. For those who were willing to talk about it, they claim that their orders were vague. No officer was ever charged, while the enlisted men wound up with prison terms and BCDs.Also not spoken about -- probably because nobody knows about it -- are the taken-for-granted assumptions about relationships between guards and prisoners. It's all very well for us, sitting at home in our Naugahide recliners, to feel angry at the way the untrained and ill-led MPs performed but, as one of them says, "Try going over there and saying that." He's right. It has to do with role playing. It's not my opinion. It's established experimental fact. I refer anyone interested to Philip Zimbardo's famous "prison experiment" in the 1950s. It's probably available on Google.Well, you might ask, does anyone come out of this perfectly serious description of perfectly despicable acts looking good? Yes, in fact. The representative of the FBI argues persuasively that his agency was able to step out of the box and recognize what was happening. And a couple of politicians, like John McCain, coming late to the game expressed their disapproval in public.One is tempted to compare it to Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure" but they're different movies with different ends in mind. Morris avoids easy judgments and asks in his usual philosophical way what the photos from Abu Ghraib "mean". This film is more interested in demonstrating what went on in the prison. I expected it to be an abusive moral diatribe but it turned out to be pretty instructive. We all know about the mistreatment, but I, at least, had never understood how endemic and intense it was. I give Gibney credit for not taking the easy route of bashing the suits in Washington more than they deserve, for not making fools of them more than they've done themselves. Only once, during a guided tour of Guantanamo Bay, does he turn sarcastic. As the cheerful guide (it's like a tour of Universal Studios) shows us the neat little cells with the neatly made bed and the comfortable slippers and the box of checkers on the night table, the pop tune "My Little Corner of the World" plays in the background -- ancient and mindless, kind of like torture.A depressing movie underneath it all.