Camden Movie Review | Taxi to The Dark Side | Alex Gibney

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Published: 12 June 2008

Camden Movie Review | Taxi To The Dark Side | Alex Gibney | Documentary

TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE
Directed by Alex Gibney
Certificate 15

“THIS is not a hotel,” a senior US army commander tells his troops at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan.
“This is not a happy place for people to get fat and lazy.”
Such understated truths abound in this clinical documentary that reveals the human cost of America’s “war on terror”, the disgraceful way the country’s security services have ignored international law in their fight with al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and in doing so have shown themselves to be as vile as their enemies.
Film-maker Alex Gibney pieces together the story of the death of an Afghan taxi driver called Dilawar at the hands of poorly trained and poorly managed American servicemen.
We are taken from fly-blown cells in Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, following a well-laid trail of detentions without charge. The film suggests the American empire is a rotten edifice that has been slowly decomposing since it reached a pinnacle during the New Deal era in the 1930s and fighting the Second World War.
Since then the moral high ground has been eroded by the Korean War, McCarthyism, Vietnam and then the rise and triumph of the neo-conservative Christian fundamentalist clique.
The 1960s backlash and Nixon were in no way tempered by the weakness of the Carter presidency: Clinton’s self-absorption failed to make good the damage done by the Reagan years. The film underlines the massive task Barack Obama faces – if he is wins the election – in rebuilding confidence in the USA as a force for good.
The actions of the soldiers in the film reveal an element of Room 101 about the treatment meted out to many of the prisoners. Stripping them naked, threatening them with snarling dogs, manacled, hooded... one private is told to simply shout at his captives for hours on end before reverting to water boarding, shackles and beatings. He reads out the ingredients on the back of a cereal packet he had been eating. He made it up on the hoof and that he had to do so reveals the tragedy both the soldiers and victims were involved in.
Being in a dangerous situation with no guidance and little training is a recipe for disaster.
The final scenes reveal a personal motivation for the film. Director Alex Gibney introduces his father, Frank, who was a navy interrogator during the Second World War.
His father tells the camera how he was on the side of good during the war: soldiers had a moral compass which was drilled into them about rules of engagement and the reasons for them going to fight fascism.
He then reflects that these rules have been undermined and the concept of “right” has been debased by the behaviour of intelligence gathering since 9/11.
It is an undermining of history, he decides: a destruction of the basic tenet of habeas corpus.
Dilawar is a faceless victim, and would have been of little significance to anyone but his grieving relatives if this film had not been made.
The behaviour of both sides in this ludicrous “war on terror” is abhorrent, and after watching this depressing documentary I felt like handing in my membership card to human race and living on an island in the middle of nowhere – except it would no doubt soon be dubbed “of strategic importance” and I’d be kicked off it by the military.

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