Taxi to the Dark Side (***1/2)

Alex Gibney won the Academy Award for this documentary over, among other films, the Iraq war chronicle No End in Sight. Using the story of of an Afghani cab driver, Dilawar, as a jumping point, Gibney portrays the moral failures that have accompanied the global war on terror declared by President Bush. As with Gibney’s previous effort, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the movie is a triumph of reportage rather than filmmaking technique. The tape of Enron employees blatantly manipulating the California energy market finds its equivalent in the autopsy footage of Dilawar’s beaten corpse, the death certificate reading “homicide,” and the famous photographs and films of blatant prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. All this is attested to by, among others, military police who were, much later, charged in the death of Dilawar.

No officers were convicted of abuse in either Afghanistan, Iraq, or Guantanemo Bay, where prisoners continue to be held, but Gibney clearly connects the abuses in all of these places to tacit and explicit policies of the administration promulgated by Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, and Department of Justice counsel John Yoo. Yoo wrote legal memoranda suggesting that no treaty, and perhaps no act of Congress, impeded the president’s ability to order torture. By removing or failing to enforce the restrictions that limited abuse, these higher-ups created the climate that encouraged a lawless climate to persist, punished the innocent, and produced no additional quantity of useful intelligence. (In fact, a coerced confession was the basis Colin Powell would use in his UN speech to suggest a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; the link and the confession were both later discredited.)

There are many tentacles to this tale, more than I can describe. The film is divided into thematic segments, and lacks a strong narrative thread. The story of Dilawar, who died after five days in US custody, only takes up a small portion of the film. Nonetheless, Gibney utilizes a range of voices and makes a strong case that, whatever the merits of the war on terror, the battle against it has produced unnecessary victims and unintelligent “intelligence.”


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viewed and reviewed 3/4/08