Uneasy Ride

Taxi to the Dark Side delivers the brutal truth.

by Sam Adams

Recommended

DARK SECRETS: Left to their own devices, American soldiers at Bagram Collection Point engaged in horrifying torture practices. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The act on which Alex Gibney's vital, shattering documentary Taxi to the Dark Side focuses is, by any standard, obscene. In December of 2002, an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar was taken into custody at Bagram Collection Point by American soldiers in connection with a rocket attack on a nearby Army camp. Five days later, he was dead, his 122-pound frame mangled by Army interrogators. He had been beaten so badly that, according to the coroner, his legs had been "pulpified."

As much an autopsy as an investigation, Taxi works backward from Dilawar's death, tracing the moral rot up the chain of command. The goal is, to some extent, quixotic, since the movie argues that one of the primary enablers for the soldiers' behavior is a deliberate lack of guidance from above.

Gibney, who previously untangled the messy skein of the Enron scandal, lays out a string of insinuations and suggestive vacuums. Donald Rumsfeld scrawls a handwritten note on a memo delimiting the use of forced standing as an interrogation technique, making light of the limitations, while Dick Cheney refers to waterboarding — an excruciating simulation of drowning that dates back to the Spanish Inquisition — as "a dunk in water."

As they did at Abu Ghraib, military officials wasted no time blaming the abuses at Bagram on rogue interrogators. But the interrogators Gibney interviews say they had no choice but to go off the map. Damien Corsetti, a military intelligence specialist who was stationed at Bagram and later at Abu Ghraib, says he was given at most six hours to watch other interrogators at work before being left to his own devices with only a mandate to produce results. 

Those devices included striking Dilawar just to hear him scream "Allah," and chaining his arms to the roof of his wire-mesh cage so that his legs filled with blood, which, combined with what one soldier estimates were more than a hundred blows, left him looking, in the coroner's words, as if he had been run over by a bus. Soldiers at Bagram said that Dilawar was an uncooperative prisoner and that they were using an approved technique to subdue him, but Moazzam Begg, who was detained alongside Dilawar and later spent three years in Guantanamo, says that what they took for shouts of defiance was Dilawar screaming for his mother.

The soldiers who speak to Gibney invariably come off sympathetically, if only for their willingness to talk. The movie might fairly be accused of minimizing their guilt in order to shift blame toward higher offices. We learn that Willie Brand struck Dilawar until his knee was sore, and then began using his other leg, but not that the hulking Corsetti — who seems the most regretful of the bunch — was known as Monster, for his ability to terrify detainees on sight. Implicit but not elaborated upon are the lessons of Gibney's 2006 documentary The Human Behavior Experiments, which shows how people placed in an unfamiliar, high-pressure environment inevitably turn toward savagery unless their actions are constrained. As Corsetti puts it, "You put people in a crazy situation, they do crazy things."

Taxi to the Dark Side uncovers no smoking gun. But better than any recent film, it demonstrates how the combination of hoo-rah slogans and amoral leadership translates into atrocity on the ground. Gibney widens his investigation to include Abu Ghraib, where Bagram commander Carolyn Wood was transferred after the death of Dilawar and another captive, and Guantanamo, where techniques like those used at Bagram, and almost certainly worse, are employed in total secrecy.

In Taxi, Jack Cloonan says that his 25 years in the FBI invariably showed that the most productive interrogation techniques relied on suasion rather than compulsion, an observation that has been echoed by John McCain, the nation's torture victim in chief. The movie does, however, go so far as to ask why the idea that torture is the ultimate truth serum is so tenacious, despite all evidence to the contrary. That may be further onto the dark side than any of us wish to go.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Taxi to the Dark Side

Directed by Alex Gibney

A ThinkFilm release