The following was published in last Friday’s (2 May 2008) “This Week” section of the Bozeman Daily Chronicle:
“We have to work the dark side, if you will,” said Vice President Dick Cheney, and “spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world.” Winner of the 2008 Academy Award for “Best Documentary Feature,” Taxi to the Dark Side exposes one aspect of the War on Terror’s dark side: abuse—bordering on torture—in America’s military prisons.
In December, 2002, an Afghan guerilla commander turned Dilawar, a 22-year-old taxi driver from rural Afghanistan, over to occupying US forces—claiming that Dilawar was a triggerman for a rocket attack on an American airbase.
Dilawar was transferred to Bagram—a former Soviet airbase, converted by occupying American forces into a military prison for the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists. A year later, Dilawar’s body was returned to his family by Red Cross volunteers. The death certificate, written in English, identified Dilawar’s cause of death as homicide.
The declaration of the War on Terror elevated combating terrorism from a matter of civil law to warfare. As warfare, military command created a vastly expanded set of acceptable approaches and procedures for interrogating and gathering intelligence from suspected terrorists. Bagram Prison was a testing ground for these new procedures.
Bagram’s military investigators were under twin pressures: the pressure to produce intelligence, and instructions from commanding officers that “the gloves are off.” One interrogator recalls being told, simply: “Soldiers are dying. Get the information.”
Taxi to the Dark Side investigates the interrogation and its procedures that resulted in Dilawar’s death. Its findings should give any American pause: tested in Bagram, applied in Abu Ghraib, and perfected in Guantanamo, the new interrogation methods are designed to intimidate, humiliate, and systematically break detainees. These methods include sleep deprivation, forced nudity and sexual humiliation, sensory disorientation (through blinding light and darkness, silence and deafening noise, heat and cold), self-inflicted pain through forced (shackled) standing, repeated blows to the detainee’s legs, and the use of detainee’s fears (including rats, attack dogs and bats)—all designed to weaken and break detainees’ resistance to revealing information.
Subjected to this regimen of abuse, Dilawar, after just five days in Bagram, was found dead, hanging from his shackles, in his isolation cell. Under pressure from the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal, the military launched an investigation into Dilawar’s treatment. In her statement at trial, the Army coroner stated that Dilawar’s lower limbs looked like they had been run over by a bus. Nevertheless, military statements have persisted in claming that no abuse occurred.
Ultimately, three soldiers were convicted of crimes related to Dilawar’s death. But where the military investigation looked down for “a few bad apples,” Taxi to the Dark Side looks up at the military chain of command. Whereas the military investigation announced Dilawar’s death as an isolated incident resulting from natural causes, Taxi to the Dark Side, tipped off by New York Times investigative reporting, places Dilawar’s death in a larger context of pervasive American prison abuse. This abuse, the film finds, is responsible for deaths of dozens of prison detainees, and has been conducted with both the tacit direct approval of America’s highest levels of command.
Shortly after his death, new military intelligence confirmed what Dilawar had claimed during detention: he was innocent. Through Dilawar’s story, Taxi to the Dark Side reveals a new regime of American interrogation practices—their genesis, implementation, and likeness to Geneva Convention-prohibited torture. The result is at once sobering and compelling. Through its sympathetic interviews with Dilawar’s interrogators, the film probes at the inhuman atmosphere in which normal American soldiers committed appalling acts, and how this atmosphere was created by the highest levels of American military command.
Taxi to the Dark Side is a terrifying exposé of the dark side of American military prisons. Unrelenting and methodical, Taxi to the Dark Side is an eminently important film that grips its viewer from opening scenes to closing exhortations.
Mark Egge
