Documenting Sins of the Bush Administration: Enron Smartest Guys Filmmaker Takes on Torture

The New York Observer, January 15th, 2008

TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE Running time 106 minutes Directed by Alex Gibney

Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side, written and narrated by Mr. Gibney, begins with the tragic story of Dilawar, an Afghan cab driver who died at the hands of American captors while in custody at Bagram prison. This second fatality of a detainee, on Dec. 10, 2002, less than a week after the first, of detainee Habibullah, was the subject of a New York Times article by Tim Golden that provided Mr. Gibney with the “central story” he felt he needed to bring a film to fruition on the torture by American authorities of suspected terrorists in the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The topic was suggested to Mr. Gibney separately by three eventual executive producers (Don Glascoff, Sid Blumenthal and Rob Johnson) of this searing indictment of the Bush administration for its undermining of the Geneva Conventions, to which the U.S. government was a signatory participant in 1955 after Senate approval.

Mr. Gibney recalls his vivid reaction to the Times article: “I was haunted by it because of the brutality of the murder, because of Dilawar’s obvious innocence, and by the very last paragraph of the piece. In it, Golden quotes one of the soldiers who remarks that after the third day of interrogation, the Bagram prison personnel had concluded that Dilawar was innocent, yet they continued to pummel his legs. That was an important detail that remained with me because it testified to the momentum of torture; once prohibitions are removed, the ‘dark side’ of human nature is inexorably unleashed. It reminded me of the Milgram experiment I included in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, which showed how, with encouragement from authority figures, individuals allow themselves to engage, incrementally, in evermore vicious acts of cruelty.”

As it turns out, Taxi to the Dark Side is more about the sins of the Bush administration than about the tragic travails of an individual Afghan taxi driver. The usual suspects are prominently featured: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales et al., mostly in public domain television footage. Mr. Gibney admits that many of the officials he wished to interview on the subject flatly refused, and that he was therefore compelled to open the floodgates to any testimonies he could find, pro or con, including articulate former detainee Moazzam Begg, who has written of his prison experiences in Bagram, Guantánamo and Kandahar; nonofficer torturers Willie Brand, Damien Corsetti and Thomas Curtis; their respective attorneys; and a few administration defenders, who, in this very one-sided presentation, constituted the token villains in the ongoing narrative. Not that I believe that there is any “sunny side” to the Bush administration’s policy on torture.

Hence, I hope that every concerned moviegoer sees this film, but I doubt that many will. It is not gruesome enough for the thrill-seeking masses, relying as it does on rational arguments that may not convince people who still believe that anything goes in the treatment of terrorists after 9/11, and that all Islamic extremists are less than human.

In this regard, I was surprised to learn that most of the detainees at Guantanamo and Bagram were not captured by American soldiers, but rather turned in for large rewards by Afghan and Iraqi tribal elders, personal enemies, and even competing opium growers. It reminded me of the amazement of Gestapo officials at the huge number of French citizens denouncing other French citizens to the Nazi occupiers. I hate to think what would happen if we were ever occupied. Anyone I ever panned could have his or her revenge.

Curiously, Senator John McCain emerges in the film as one of the good guys on the torture issue, along with the more predictably censorious Senator Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Not only is Senator McCain speaking out against the policies of his own party; he is also the only politician in either party to have endured torture in a North Vietnamese prison. I just wonder how well his remarks will sound to the so-called Republican base. Indeed, as persuasive as I find Mr. Gibney’s film, he may have to contend with a populace suffering too much from media-driven compassion and guilt fatigue to take up the cause of maltreated Afghans and Iraqis, especially when our own troops and their superiors are the perps.

As I was watching Taxi to the Dark Side, I couldn’t help thinking of another film on Afghanistan I had recently seen amid the December flood of releases, and that was, of course, Mike Nichols’ Charlie Wilson’s War, from a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book by George Crile. The action was set in the late 80’s of the Cold War when it was the Russians who were brutalizing the Afghan civilians, and one lecherous, cocaine-addicted Texas congressman, played by Tom Hanks, stood in the way of the Soviets. How? Simply by finagling Congress to appropriate enough money to supply the forerunners of the Taliban with long-range missile launchers with which to shoot down Russian helicopter gunships. The Russians are shown gossiping in their doomed aircraft, being comically complacent about their invulnerability when: Boom! Poof! They’re gone. What fun! It is less fun now that American troops are doing the dying.

I had written about the implicit irony in Charlie Wilson’s War in the midst of contemporary headlines even before I had seen the movie. Now that I have seen it, I like it well enough, particularly for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s cynical C.I.A. agent, who supplies a witty skepticism about all C.I.A. ventures, past, present and future.

Mr. Hanks was more convincing in his role than I had been led to expect from the reviews, and Julia Roberts was totally miscast in hers, which I had also been led to expect from the reviews. Mr. Hoffman remains constantly peerless in this respect, as does Tony Leung in Lust, Caution, a performance left off my 2007 acting lists by a typographical gremlin.