| Taxi To the Dark Side | 
 enlarge | Actors: Alex Gibney, Alberto Mora, John Yoo, Scott Horton, Alfred Mccoy
Studio: Velocity / Thinkfilm
Category: DVD
List Price: $27.98
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Avg. Customer Rating:   (14 reviews)
Sales Rank: 3300
Format: Ac-3, Color, Dolby, Dvd-video, Widescreen, Ntsc
Language: English (Original Language)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD
Running Time: 106 minutes
Number Of Items: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.78:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.6
MPN: IMEDTF4940D
UPC: 014381494020
EAN: 0014381494020
ASIN: B001BEK8FQ
Release Date: September 30, 2008
Theatrical Release Date: 2007
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Album Description
Oscarr-nominated director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) investigates the torture and killing of an innocent Afghani taxi driver in this gripping probe into reckless abuses of government power. Disturbing and incisive, the Academy Awardr-winner Taxi To The Dark Side incorporates rare and never-before-seen images from inside the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons into its exposure of the Bush administration's "global war on terror." This stunningly crafted narrative demonstrates how this one man's life and death symbolizes the erosion of our civil rights and how what it means to be an American has changed forever.
Amazon.com
Among the slew of documentaries inspired by the post-9/11 war, arguably none is more important than Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side. The story it has to tell, with compelling thoroughness and no recourse to rhetoric, should be as disturbing to Americans supporting the war as it is to opponents. In December 2002, Dilawar, a young rural Afghan cabdriver, was accused of helping to plan a rocket attack on a U.S. base, clamped into prison at Bagram, and subjected to physical torture so relentless that he died after two days of it. But Dilawar was innocent--and he'd been denounced by the real culprit, who thereby took the heat off himself and won points with U.S. forces by giving them "a bad guy." Dilawar was the first fatal victim of Vice President Dick Cheney's devotion to "working the dark side"--torturing, humiliating, and otherwise abusing prisoners in the "Global War on Terror." His story, developed in horrific detail with testimony from the soldiers who tortured him, and also from two New York Times investigative reporters, becomes a prism for slanting light onto the "dark side" policy and the mindset behind it. The program at Bagram was deemed such a success that it served as the model for Abu Graibh the following year in Iraq, and both prisons became pipelines to the detainee facility at Guantanamo, Cuba. The film's impact is powerful and complex. We come to see the very soldiers who broke Dilawar's body and spirit as victims, too--and patsies of a policy that, from Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on down, ignored the Geneva Convention and shrouded itself (and commanding officers) in "a fog of ambiguity" while the grunts took the fall. A lot of these grunts testify here, and the accumulation of their individual perspectives on a shared tragedy is devastating. The latter half of the film features penetrating commentary from critics of torture as a policy (Senator John McCain was still one at the time), all of whom agree that it doesn't work and it only damages us. And for Theatre of the Absurd, there's a PR tour of (a discrete portion of) the Guantanamo facility, which turns out to be kinda like summer camp: "They get ice cream on Sundays." Finally, Taxi to the Dark Side isn't about torture or politics or the justness or unjustness of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq. Gibney is entirely correct when he says, "It's really about the American character and whether we have become something rather different from what we imagine ourselves to be." He's asking; he doesn't want it to be true. --Richard T. Jameson
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
Incredibly important film December 3, 2008
Taking as its example an innocent taxi driver who was arrested, tortured and murdered at Bagram Prison pursuant to a widespread and unreliable method of detaining suspects by offering financial incentives to local warlords, this careful and thorough documentary clearly connects the dots to explain how America has stripped 83,000 detainees of their freedom and human rights in the name of protecting the same freedom and rights of Americans. The film makes an extremely cogent argument that the Cheney/Bush Administration philosophy of torture is unjustified under both moral or pragmatic grounds, and that the legacy of abuses committed at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay Prisons is not only immoral but counter-productive. Equally outrageous is that the lower level military personnel who perpetrated these frimes were court-martialed, while the top government officials (including most notably Cheney and Rumsfeld) who instituted and defended these tactics were never held accountable. If the vast resources America has spent detaining and torturing prisoners had instead been spent improving the conditions for war-stricken Muslim villages, we might have actually made some progress in the ill-conceived "war on terror".
 First-rate documentary filmmaking December 1, 2008
A damning and impassioned examination of use of torture by the United States on suspected terrorists after the September 11th attacks, stretching from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Iraq.
Do They Really Want It Hidden? November 20, 2008
Yes, the torture depicted in this film is an embarrassment and a possible war crime. Yes, the Administration under whose auspices it occurred seems to relish secrecy above all else. And yet, one has to wonder if perhaps there was a reason to let it be revealed which overrode all the reasons for keeping it hidden. Namely, to de-sensitize the American public to the very idea of torture. The fact that as much as 40% of the American people "approve" of torture is not a statistic to be taken lightly. And now the people have seen it in action, not merely read about it in news reports. The simple truth is, torture will be easier, not harder, to get away with the next time around - because the precedent has been set and now people are beginning to get used to the idea of it. Each of the former soldiers interviewed (many of whom are or have been on trial) expressed great remorse; but at the time they were executing the torture, their focus was only on doing their duty, not questioning it. The most telling (and most chilling) piece of these soldiers' story was that they each took a turn at kicking Dilwar's legs because they didn't know that someone else already had - it wasn't a case of them all standing around kicking him again and again but of each kicking him as part of his own independent interrogation regime. So, if these soldiers are to be believed, it was a lack of communication more than anything else that killed Dilwar. Apparently, it wasn't important to coordinate the soldiers' efforts to extract information - which makes you wonder if information was ever the goal of the "interrogation." So, ironically, it's more the gross incompetence and inefficiency of torture than the sheer brutality of it that may convince people to outlaw it once and for all.
Required Viewing for Every American November 10, 2008
Quite simply the most important documentary made in recent years.
Here is the true shame of the Bush administration -- the complete disregard for the Geneva Conventions in the prosecution of the "war on terror".
Most shocking of all is the revelation that one of the key pieces of "intelligence" on which Colin Powell based his rationale for the Iraq War was false, the claim of a prisoner tortured into confessing what his captors wanted to hear.
Powell states that the day he pitched the war at the United Nations, relying on this grossly deficient intelligence, was one of the most "embarrassing" of his life.
Embarrassing? More appropriate words might be "tragic", "disastrous", or "unconscionable".
Worse, the Bush administration policy of employing torture, kangaroo courts, and the suspension of habeus corpus -- in defiance of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions -- came right from the top.
Here is Cheney snarling that these methods were necessary in the war on terror. Here is Bush trying to sell the need for "harsh" interrogation techniques as late as 2006. Here are presidential counsel John Yoo and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales trying to redefine "torture" as an acceptable component in prosecuting a war.
The whole lot of them should be made to experience 40 hours of sleep deprivation, or forced standing, or waterboarding -- to see for themselves why these forms of coercion bring us down to the level of any terrorists walking the planet.
FOR SHAME! FOR SHAME!
Let us hope that Barack Obama can help lead us back from this precipice of damnation to the brighter path Americans have chosen in previous generations.
The DVD also includes special features not included in the theatrical release of the film. Most notable of these is an interview with former President Jimmy Carter, who calls the Bush torture policies a disgrace as well as a sharp break with traditional American values.
The director's father also makes an appearance. He was an intelligence officer during WWII and the Korean War, and he rightly compares the Bush thugs to Hitler's goons back in Nazi Germany.
"Taxi to the Dark Side" is a film EVERY American needs to see, whatever your political leaning.
(P.S. another reviewer here has claimed this film condones torture. Huh? Was this person paying an iota of attention? "Taxi" condemns torture in no uncertain terms, you may be sure...)
prosecutable war crimes October 31, 2008
On December 5, 2002, an Afghan taxi driver named Diliwar was taken to America's prison at the Bagram Air Force Base. Five days later he was dead. At first the military said that he had died of "natural causes," but in a later inquiry the coroner testified that his lower body had been "pulpified." On his death certificate issued by the military the box marked "homicide" was checked. Taxi to the Dark Side won an Academy Award as best documentary for portraying detainee abuse and torture at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo. There are at least 83,000 detainees in US custody; over 108 of them have died, at least 37 by homicide. The film combines interviews with the military police who interrogated Diliwar, genuine heroes in this sordid story like Alberto Mora (General Counsel to the Navy 2001-2006), grotesque still photos that shock the conscience, justifications of the abuse by John Yoo, and commentary by investigative reporters and attorneys. If you think that this film exaggerates, or if you still believe that American torture consisted of some isolated incidents by a "few bad apples," and was not official public policy engineered by our top officials, then read the books by Philippe Sands, Torture Team; Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values (New York: Palgrave, 2008), and Jane Mayer, The Dark Side; The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008).
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