Torture and truth

>> Alex Gibney on Taxi to the Dark Side,
his Oscar-winning indictment of the
Bush administration’s treatment
of prisoners of war

WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME: Dilawar

by MATTHEW HAYS

The haunting images that emerged from the Abu Ghraib scandal are instantly recognizable. Inmates in the Iraqi prison stacked in a human pyramid while naked. A hooded man, standing with arms outstretched, with wires attached to his torso. Snarling dogs, poised just inches away from a hooded inmate, hands tied behind his back.

But the images, as disturbing as they are, only tell a small part of the story of what happened in the Iraqi prison. In his latest documentary, Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) goes about telling us the entire story of how the Bush administration decided the Geneva Conventions were quaint in the wake of 9/11, taking us through the gruelling stories of prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. It is a painful film to watch, the intensely powerful intertwining stories of prisoners, interrogators and policy wonks. And Taxi to the Dark Side is also the story of a government that is out of control and entirely out of its depth.

When someone approached Gibney about making such a doc on the U.S. practice of torture, he wasn’t entirely sure. “It’s a tough subject,” he concedes. “Trying to convince someone to come to the cinema to see a film about torture?” But then Gibney had some conversations with his father, a WWII veteran who had worked as an interrogator for the navy. Gibney Sr. was furious about the Bush administration’s intentional watering down of the Geneva Conventions, pointing out that testimony retrieved using torture was usually worthless, as those under duress will say anything their captors want to hear. And the WWII vet felt that that torture had undermined America’s position in the world, effectively terminating anyone’s idea of it as a noble nation-state. “This story was too important to ignore,” Gibney says.

For Gibney, the story of going wayward can be traced to Afghanistan, where Bush’s War on Terror launched, and where Dick Cheney indicated that the gloves would have to come off. While poring over the information surrounding what American interrogators had been up to, Gibney was struck hard by a piece written by reporter Tim Golden for The New York Times. Golden wrote about the beating of Dilawar, an Afghan cab driver who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was arrested by American military officials, detained and tortured until his death in a prison cell. The kicker? Days before his death, a document had circulated stating that interrogators thought Dilawar was entirely innocent. His brutal death, which American officials acknowledged was a homicide, had been for nothing.

True crime

In exhaustive detail, Gibney then takes us through the story, interviewing a number of the interrogators themselves, who reveal how the instruction they received from above led them to believe that employing torture was an acceptable thing.

“The fact that they continued to torture Dilawar says something about the momentum of torture,” Gibney says. “Once it has begun, it is difficult to stop.”

Gibney did find himself recoiling in horror as he scanned the images taken at the prisons, especially those at Abu Ghraib. Some of them we are familiar with, but Gibney chooses to show them without genitalia obscured, the way the mainstream press has done. The effect of seeing everything makes the images that much more shocking, but Gibney says he ultimately felt the need for restraint. “There were images that were so grisly we chose not to show them. They were just too gruesome. I think they would have had the effect of simply forcing an audience to shut down completely.”

Gibney says support for torture occurs for a bunch of reasons, one being the shock Americans felt after 9/11, another being that people mistakenly think it’s an effective way of getting at the truth. “The film questions what the real utility of torture is. By doing this, the Bush administration was digging into the Cold War toolbox, the torture tactics used by the Chinese and Soviets to get false confessions out of people. I am convinced the administration was not ultimately interested in hearing the truth. They wanted to hear something that could justify their actions.”

Taxi to the Dark Side includes footage of Republican presidential hopeful John McCain, while he was detained during the Vietnam War. But while McCain has been outspoken in his criticism of the use of torture, Gibney says he now appears to be softening his stance, to appease the GOP’s right-wing base. “He’s now doing things for political expediency, which is disconcerting.”

Taxi to the Dark Side opens
this Friday, March 21

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