As seen at the
2007 San Diego Film Festival:
Alex Gibney’s
Taxi to the Dark Side is yet another left-wing
documentary that stretches the truth to vocalize accusatory
conspiracy-theories regarding the Bush Administration. The film
is slightly more insightful than other pictures that have tried
to tackle the same subject-matter, but is even more dangerous
than its counterparts because of its slick assembly. Gibney,
like a discreet and more-talented version of Michael Moore, has
cherry-picked numerous facts and strung them together to create
false political-revelations for uninformed viewers. “I’m so glad
that someone is making this type of movie to keep me up
to date with the injustices that are taking place in the world!”
a young woman enthusiastically proclaimed while walking out of
the screening that I attended of the film. If only she was smart
enough to realize that Taxi to the Dark Side was
instilling anti-Bush views in her mind by utilizing numerous
half-truths and a lot of sticky editing-glue.
The film deals
with the U.S. Military’s allegedly inhumane torture of hundreds
of Islamic Prisoners. Gibney specifically zeroes in on the case
of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi-cab driver who was turned over as a
terrorist to the personnel at Bagram Air Force Base. At Bagram,
Dilawar was supposedly tortured to death by being shackled to
the ceiling of his prison-cell using handcuffs, a practice that
Gibney’s interviewees (mainly former interrogators) say is all
too common in Iraq. The film uses this story as a means of
transitioning into explorations of similar suspected offenses
taking place at Abu Ghraib (the famous Iraqi POW-camp that was
led by the same woman as the one at Bagram), Guantanamo Bay, and
several other locations.
Throughout the
duration of Taxi to the Dark Side, Gibney’s subjects make
several points about mistakes made within the American Military
on the Bush Administration’s watch, many of which are worthy of
consideration. Certain concerns vocalized in the film about the
military’s use of torture are legitimate, particularly those
regarding the way the practice has been recently implemented. In
the third act of Taxi to the Dark Side, we learn that
Dilawar’s case was one of many in which Islamist militant-forces
turned over an innocent man to American Authorities as a
suspected-terrorist because of the U.S.’ policy to reward Afghan
Warlords for (often false) Intelligence. To many viewers, this
will come as a highly shocking revelation. Another interesting
truth raised by Gibney’s subjects is the fact that the majority
of American interrogators have little-to-no experience in the
field, and their lack of qualifications provides them poor
chances of “breaking” suspected terrorists.
Despite
providing viewers some worthy food-for-thought, Taxi to the
Dark Side suffers from two central problems, both of which
are typical of standard-issue leftist “documentaries.” As
touched on before, one of the film’s major faults is that it
tries to chalk all of the injustices discussed up to President
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and former Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Gibney both crisply and troublingly
traces the Dilawar-case back to what he views as the Bush
Administration’s defiance of the Geneva Convention and
suspension of habeus corpus. When this seems like too
much of a stretch, he instantly cites the same corruption of the
C.I.A., never mentioning the fact that this organization has
been plagued by far less problems under Bush’s Presidency than
it was under those of Clinton, Bush’s father, Reagan, and
Carter. Gibney rarely considers the possibility that internal
corruption pertaining to higher-ups in the Military may be
entirely to blame for wrongly-conducted torture. This is perhaps
for the better, given it ensures that he never smears American
Soldiers, who have recently been unfairly provided conflicting
ideas about torture by their superiors.
The other
prominent (if slightly more theoretical) problem with the film
is that it never offers a strong argument proving that the U.S.
government’s use of mandated-torture is wrong. While somewhat
sympathetic to Gibney’s claim that the country has violated the
Geneva Convention by torturing suspected terrorists in the hopes
of intercepting Intelligence, I sided more with the arguments
vocalized in the documentary by Bush Administration attorney
John Yoo. Yoo rationally justifies the moderate torture that the
United States government did condone (he unfortunately never
addresses that which it did not) as a means of confronting a
Radical Islamist Enemy. The only comment that Gibney makes
through his interviewees regarding this issue is that he feels
that suspected-terrorists are more likely to confess to/talk
about crimes if provided a luxury (such as a paid-for education
for their children) rather than tortured, a notion that I
frankly do not buy. Gibney seems all too sympathetic with the
Enemy, which may prove dangerous because, at the same time, he
comes across as a credible political observer. I would hate for
Taxi to the Dark Side to cause unknowing viewers to
develop hostilities toward a mostly-effective United States
Foreign Policy. Still, I have a moderate respect for the movie’s
ability to raise the aforementioned select, valid points
regarding the use of torture in the War on Terror.
-Danny Baldwin,
Bucket Reviews
Review Published
on: 10.4.2007
Screened on:
9.29.2007 at the Pacific Gaslamp 15 in San Diego, CA.
Taxi to the Dark Side is rated R and
runs 106 minutes.
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