Moving Past Torture: A Review of the Film Taxi to the Dark Side

Soon after the photos of Abu Ghraib were released, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told the U.S. Congress that the world should "watch how a democracy deals with the wrongdoing and with the scandal and the pain of acknowledging and correcting our own mistakes and our own weaknesses."

The Secretary went on to appoint a dizzying number of investigation teams -- more than two dozen. Each was tasked with an isolated aspect of the abuse to investigate. None of them looked at the big picture. "The problem is that they have created a patchwork of investigations and a lot will fall through the cracks," warned retired 2-star Admiral John Hutson in an interview with the New York Times. While the investigations netted several bad apples (seven junior soldiers went to jail in connection with Abu Ghraib), many of the policies (and policymakers) that made torture possible are still in place.

Taxi to the Dark Side, a documentary film about Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver who was tortured to death by U.S. forces, turns over stones Department of Defense investigators avoided touching.

Alex Gibney, the filmmaker, interviews the guards who beat Dilawar; they kicked him so hard that his legs "pulpified" according to one medical examiner. Their comments are revealing. They did it, because that is just how they operated and that is what they thought they were supposed to do. They didn't do it because they thought Dilawar was guilty. Indeed, they thought they had "the wrong man."

And here is where the film goes further than former Secretary Rumsfeld was ever willing to go. It explores what led more or less average Americans to think they should torture a detainee, or to be more exact all the detainees.

Many of the root causes lie with a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of administration decision makers about the efficacy of torture. In a particularly illuminating -- and very creepy -- sequence, Gibney interviews Alfred McCoy, an author who has researched the CIA's use of torture.

Many of the same techniques that were used on Dilawar (and in other instances of abuse such as Abu Ghraib) stem from a manual the CIA put together in the 60s. As it turns out the manual is based on the research of a psychologist from Canada (of all places). It jumps to wild conclusions based on limited studies he did with students. For example, this is the genesis of the idea of subjecting detainees to sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation at the same time. But as the psychologist himself explains (in old video dug up by Gibney): depriving someone of sleep for 72 hours combined with sensory deprivation often leads to psychosis. People become incoherent. They hallucinate. Everything they say is unreliable. According to Department of Defense documents, the Army subjected one suspected terrorist to 49 days straight of this regimen.

Perhaps one reason the former Secretary of Defense, the Vice President and others have gotten this so spectacularly wrong is that they have not reached out to seasoned interrogators to solicit their views on how interrogations ought to be performed. About two-thirds of the way through the film, Gibney introduces Jack Cloonan, a 25-year veteran interrogator with the FBI. Cloonan looks directly into the camera and explains how he broke suspected terrorists and other bad guys for the FBI. It wasn't by shooting them in the leg, or breaking their fingers. It was by talking to them and appealing to their self-interest. Cloonan's approach may not land him a role on the FOX show "24", but it gets results.

Gibney, the filmmaker, has done his homework. He is interested in harder questions than simply, "who did this?" He wants to know why and how it could be done better. And, in this way, the film is both thoroughly depressing (you want to cry the last time you see Dilawar's picture flash on the screen) and at the same time offers a sliver of hope. Because what makes Taxi so compelling and watchable is that it doesn't just document the abuse, it begins to point to a better way.

Comments

[lgillooly]

When will they be held accountable? Thus Country needs to follow the Constitution and Impeach,otherwise we will never heal.

[10ghostcommander]

I am beginning to think that a big part of this torture scandal and the fact that it became so public is this--This is a psychological dagger aimed at the mind of the American Citizenry. They want you to think-if they can do this to another person, they can do it to me. Experts have known for years that physical torture does not yield reliable information. So, why do it?