Driving Lessons

Taxi to the Dark Side director Alex Gibney discusses torture's role in global relations.

by Sam Adams

Taxi to the Dark Side director Alex Gibney

Alex Gibney takes torture personally. His documentary Taxi to the Dark Side is a searing condemnation of the United States' willingness to use torture in the "war on terror," inspired in part by his father's experience interrogating Japanese prisoners of war in World War II.

"When he was an interrogator, there was no discussion of waterboarding, forced standing or sensory deprivation," Gibney says by phone from his New York office. "It was strictly rapport-building. He was getting good information by talking straightforwardly to these guys."

On vacation in Cambodia last winter, Gibney visited a deserted school near Phnom Penh that was converted into a prison for the Khmer Rouge. There, in the chambers used to coerce false confessions from prisoners who were then executed for their purported crimes, he saw the still-standing apparatus for waterboarding.

Although the evidence of experienced interrogators seems to suggest uniformly that torture does not work, Gibney surmises that it persists for two reasons. One, of course, is simple vengeance. The other is that the one thing torture guarantees is a predictable result. The CIA interrogators who used waterboarding on Faraj al-Libi were told to produce proof that al-Qaida had set up training camps inside Iraq, and so they did. Their information was later proven false, but by then the United States was already engaged in a war against a known terrorist supporter. "When they tortured somebody, they got the information they wanted to hear," Gibney says. "In the hands of people in power, it becomes a political tool."

Gibney concedes that the arguments in favor of torture are "much easier to understand. Millions of people will live if we just hurt one person. Who wouldn't be for that?" But, he adds, "If you understand the issue, you realize it's a terrifying argument. Pretty soon, your whole legal system is corrupt."

The system as it is now set up leaves the discretion of which techniques to use in the hands of individual interrogators. But Gibney says that when you place a human being under extreme pressure to produce results without sufficient guidance, even the most noble person is likely to turn brutal. "We can all go there," he says. "Let's just admit it. That's why you have the rules."

(s_adams@citypaper.net)