There are always two sides to a story. My father always told
me when I was growing up, never accept someone’s opinion on any one side of the
story. Figure it out yourself. His advice helped; I’d like to think of myself
as a fair person. I would go through both the sides before committing to any
one side. But when I saw Alex Gibney’s documentary
Taxi to the Dark Side, I decided to
take his side without even pausing to consider that there could be another side
to the story. Taxi to the Dark Side
beholds to the global audience what the Bush administration had been doing in
their bid to “work the dark side.” (Dick Cheney)
Taxi opens with
the death of a young Afghan taxi driver, Dilawar at the hands of American
soldiers at the American prison at Bagram, Afghanistan. Deemed to be a
terrorist by a paid informer, he was tortured so violently at the prison, that
he died five days after his arrival. Even though the official report stated
that Dilawar died of “natural causes”, Tim Golden and Carlotta Gall of The New York Times uncovered the autopsy
report which clearly stated that Dilawar’s death was homicidal in nature. The
report further stated that his lower limbs were so badly compromised because of
excessive beatings, that had he lived he would have had to go through double
amputations; there was just no way to save his legs.
Establishing the brutality early on with the death of
Dilawar, Gibney goes on to showcase the US Government’s use of legalised
torture in the prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo. The government’s scrupulous way
of hiding behind the legal jargon and bending the laws at will to deny the
“suspected” terrorists their basic rights, while at the same time blatantly
flouting the Geneva Convention took the world by shock. And yet no one dares
to speak against the super power. The documentary is a well-researched
investigation, and positions itself as a counter argument against the
administration’s “justified” use of “necessary means” to bring justice to all
those who “lost” on 9/11.
Taxi includes
frank interviews of a number of service men who were responsible for “breaking”
Dilawar. While some stated that they actually believed what they were doing was
right, some admitted that even if it affected their humane feelings for
Dilawar, they could do nothing about it as the orders came from “the top”,
which were “break your detainees”. The documentary also has sound bites of Dick
Cheney, the then Vice President and George W. Bush, then President of United
States of America. One particular sound bite of President Bush disturbed me; he
announces gleefully to the American public that the ‘War on Terror’ is on its
right course, after yet again another air attack on an Afghan Village. He says,
“One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice. Well,
let me put it this way, they are no longer a problem to the US and her
friends.” What president talks like this?! This is identical to a Martin
Scorsese movie quote about mob bosses. Well, President Bush sure did prove
himself to be the mob boss alright.
The documentary raises question regarding the legitimacy of
modern day interrogation techniques. Gibney also points out that popular TV
series like 24 may have contributed
to the rise of these ‘new and modern interrogation techniques.’ What is
chilling is that, John Woo, the Justice Department lawyer and the mastermind
behind legalizing torture and denying the suspected terrorists the Geneva
Convention Protection, graciously gave interviews to justify his actions.
Gibney captures the CIA’s ruthlessness by portraying how thrilled they were
when Water boarding (a torture technique popularized in the modern era by the
Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia) and Sensory Deprivation were okayed as valid
interrogation techniques.
The film is convincingly graphic and visual. Amid all the
sound bites and interviews are illustrated the humiliation that the prisoners,
especially in Abu Ghraib faced. Some of the service men in the interviews
stated that they were told to ‘dehumanise’ their detainees. They sure did
manage to achieve that.
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