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Movie Review - Taxi from the Dark Side
Disgusting look at the “unofficial" torture policies of the US
Taxi from the Dark Side
2:00 am Mar 17 - by Syd Slobodnik – Buzz Writer
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Taxi to the Dark Side
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MPAA Rating: RCurrent Showtimes: No showtimes available
Alex Gibney’s 2007 Academy Award winning best feature documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, is a chilling look at the new legacy of the United States’ torture of detainees suspected of terrorism and other crimes from Bagram, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantanimo Bay, Cuba. Written and narrated by Gibney, whose previous film was the revealing Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side uncovers the compelling and stunning tale of the dark and ugly side of the US policy in response to the 9/11 attacks.
Gibney opens the film by exploring the story of a young Afghan taxi driver who was captured and tortured to death in 2002. Like many recent left-leaning antiwar documentaries, The Fog of War, Why We Fight and No End in Sight, Gibney picks the obvious targets of the President, Vice President and defense secretary for critical barbs of this policy. Gibney also reveals the extreme ideas of John Yoo, a US. Department of Justice official, for being the “architect of torture” in the Bush Administration and Alberto Gonzalez, then legal counsel to the President, for justifying numerous dehumanizing tortures, which included various forms of sleep and sensory deprivation, sexual humiliation, shackling and beatings. All along the administration insists that these detainees failed to meet the standards of the Geneva Convention rules, so the internationally accepted rules don’t apply to their treatment.
With a disgusting array of archive footage, still photos of tortured detainees, recent interviews with intelligence officers, military guards and two NY Times journalists, Carlotta Gall and Tim Golden, viewers witness an indictment of the US response to our 9/11 tragedies. Videotaped interviews of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld paint an arrogant image of America’s might in justifying such horrible actions that Gibney indirectly parallels to that of Nazi concentration camps of WWII. The one voice of Congressional reason depicted by the film is Senator John McCain. Gibney even includes a faded 1968 filmed interview when McCain was held captive in Hanoi.
Even more shocking is how the film suggests that 35% of Americans still approved of the use of torture on terrorist suspects, even after the Abu Ghraib revelations. Gibney implies that Americans have become conditioned to such behaviors from pop action heroes like Jack Bauer of Fox’s popular 24. By allowing such torture in the name of protecting our American freedoms Gibney suggests that we are losing our precious core values, those inalienable rights for which our Founding Fathers fought.
Jeff Brandt (Jeff Brandt) said on Mar. 19, 2008 at 7:47 pm:
This sounds like a must-see, but one that will be painful, like An Inconvenient Truth. It's hard to believe that a nation that calls out other countries' human rights violations finds it suitable to torture prisoners. It's disgusting.
Things like this make me fear the day when America will plummet into economic crisis once and for all and then, with our troops spread frivolously across the globe, we will be incapable of defending ourselves against the legions of pissed off armies, navies, and air forces that attack us.