Down a Dark Road: Taxi to the dark side

Dilawar, an Afghan cab driver whose story is the centerpiece of
IMO..Likely 95% of the detainees at that hellhole are not guilty of anything more than being pissed as they watch their families and friends decimated by the occupiers.

I watched this documentary/movie a few years ago, very disturbing.



Dilawar, an Afghan cab driver whose story is the centerpiece of "Taxi to the Dark Side," died at Bagram Air Base after five days in U.S. custody. (Jigsaw Productions)

By Richard Leiby
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, April 27, 2007

In 2002, a young Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who'd never spent a night away from his dusty little village, got lost in the fog of war and took a wrong turn into an abyss from which he would never return. It was a detention center at Bagram Air Base, where he was grilled on suspicion of being a Taliban fighter. Military interrogators hung him from a cage in chains, kept him up all night and kicked him senseless, turning his legs into pulp.

He lasted only five days. The Army initially attributed his death to natural causes, even though coroners had ruled it a homicide. Low-level soldiers were punished. It turned out that Dilawar (who, like many Afghans, used only one name) was not an enemy fighter, had no terrorist connections and had committed no crime at all.

"He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was the wrong man," says filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose latest documentary, "Taxi to the Dark Side," puts the fate of one hapless, ordinary Afghan into a larger and more disturbing context. Its focus is torture, and whether torture became a deliberate component of U.S. policy at places like Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Researchers at Human Rights First have categorized more than 70 detainee deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as homicides linked to gross recklessness, abuse or torture. The findings are based largely on the military's own records, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, according to Hina Shamsi, an attorney for the organization.

"Murder's torture," Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former Colin Powell aide, says in the film. "Murder's the ultimate torture."

More than 250 service members have been "held accountable for their roles" in detainee abuse cases, according to a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros. But official inquiries have basically exonerated the brass. Indeed, a dozen such reviews found no evidence of "a government policy directing, encouraging or condoning abuse," Ballesteros says. "I can tell you that, in general, humane treatment of detainees is and always has been the Department of Defense standard."

Gibney's 2005 Oscar-nominated documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room" explored corporate and personal corruption. "Taxi," he says, explores corruption of the rule of law and American principles. His conclusion, supported by Wilkerson and several other experts in the film, is unflinching: Those truly responsible for the detainee deaths are the top Pentagon and Bush administration officials who set the detainee policies in motion.

"Taxi," which premieres tomorrow at the Tribeca Film Festival, is part of a long tradition of documentaries that tell the Unofficial Story, revisiting and synthesizing media coverage of events, then probing further. They posit conclusions or lead viewers to them through well-grounded arguments, saying, essentially, Take another look. Forget the trees, here's the forest. Among those that have won accolades: "Hearts and Minds" (1974), "The Panama Deception" (1992) and "Waco: The Rules of Engagement" (1997).

"The film becomes a sort of agent provocateur," says Gibney. "Part of my brief is to make a hopelessly complicated and arcane subject comprehensible to the average viewer."


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