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If the 22-year-old taxi driver named Dilawar had lived, it would have been necessary to amputate his legs. They had been "pulpified" during interrogation at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan where he died in December 2002.
Filmmaker Alex Gibney ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room") first read about Dilawar in The New York Times. He says he was haunted by the brutality of the death, by Dilawar's apparent innocence and by the soldier who said the prisoner's legs were pummeled even though the Americans concluded he had not been involved in a rocket attack as suspected.
- Rating: R for disturbing images, and content involving torture and graphic nudity.
- Web site: "Taxi to the Dark Side"
"Once prohibitions are removed, the 'dark side' of human behavior is inexorably unleashed," Gibney says in the notes for his film "Taxi to the Dark Side." The title capitalizes on a comment Vice President Cheney made after 9/11 about spending time in the shadows of the intelligence world.
Gibney uses Dilawar's death to investigate how and why prisoners died in custody, how techniques that ranged from cruel to criminal migrated from Afghanistan to Iraq and Guantanamo Bay and how some Americans lost their moral bearings and paid the price for practices condoned by superiors.
He shows a disconnect between administration officials in Washington, D.C., and the foot soldiers in the global war on terrorism who never received or read guidelines about interrogation and torture but were later prosecuted for their actions.
A U.S. Army interrogator says practices at Bagram were no secret. "The brass knew. They saw them shackled. They saw them hooded. Right on, y'all doing a good job," he was told. And after Abu Ghraib, the investigation looked down, not up, retired Rear Adm. John Hutson suggests.
The documentary addresses sleep deprivation, sensory disorientation, stress positions and forced standing for prolonged periods, plus the difference between trying to build rapport with a prisoner and tormenting or frightening him into submission.
Gibney's film is dense with interviews, news footage, images that would not have appeared in the mainstream media due to their graphic nature, nudity and evidence of brutality, and some re-creations.
He speaks with more than two dozen people, including Dilawar's bewildered family of peanut farmers; Times reporters; the author of "Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram and Kandahar"; former Justice Department official John Yoo; and Alberto Mora, onetime general counsel with the U.S. Navy.
"Taxi," one of five documentaries competing for the Oscar Sunday, paints a bleak picture in which suspected terrorists often are turned in simply for the bounty and languish in custody. And as former FBI agent Jack Cloonan suggests, "We don't know what revenge is coming down the road."
Gibney dedicates the film to his father, Frank B. Gibney, who died in April 2006. He had been a Naval interrogator in World War II who questioned Japanese prisoners on Okinawa and was furious over recent reports of brutality and coercion.
"Taxi," opening Friday at the Harris Theater, Downtown, is not easy to watch, but it is intelligent, illuminating and, sadly, still timely.
