BuzzFlash Reviews
Academy Award Winner for Best Documentary -- Taxi to the Dark Side (DVD)
Directed by Alex Gibney
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Watch the trailer here.
Along with "No End in Sight", this is one of the many films about the Bush regimes disastrous war in Iraq that we believe is a must see.
"No End in Sight" tells the cogent story about how the Bush Administration abysmally failed at managing the Iraq occupation. It is succinct, absorbing and debunks any notion that Republicans know how to manage their way out of a paper bag, let alone a war.
There are many good documentaries on how we have compromised our stature and dignity and the safety of our soldiers and nation by engaging in torture, but "Taxi to the Dark Side" is the most compelling of them -- and most watchable.
The oldest adage of news stories, film making, fiction and non-fiction is tell your story by focusing on a personal incident. In short, we relate to the travails of individuals more than we do to dispassionate overviews.
If you have any doubt about the veracity of this old saw, think about the story of Anne Frank. Millions were killed by the Nazis, but it is the diary of one teenage girl that most captivated the world -- and it was of her thoughts and experiences before she was sent to die in a concentration camp.
So it is that "Taxi to the Dark Side" provides a riveting account of how one innocent small town Afghani taxi driver accidentally got ensnared in the Bush torture apparatus and died after just two days of "enhanced interrogation."
To those BuzzFlash readers who have been too uncomfortable to watch some of the documentaries on torture in Iraq, we highly recommend that you give "Taxi to the Dark Side" a try. Yes, there are moments that are grisly and painful, but it is a gripping documentary with a well-crafted and edited narrative. It convincingly reminds us of what we have lost in moral authority as a nation, and how the story of a taxi driver illustrates all that has gone wrong with the Bush/Cheney doctrine.
From an online reviewer:
With this extraordinary film director Alex Gibney makes a convincing and well researched case against the acts of torture, abuse and humiliation committed by the U.S. military against political prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
A major sub-plot is the story of Dilawar, an Afghan taxi driver who ended up dying from injuries suffered while he was held in Bagram, a former Soviet prison coverted into a U.S. detention center for suspected terroists. However, the film explains how Dilawar was actually an innocent man turned in by an actual terroist seeking to throw investigators off his trail. One expert explains how only about 1% of the detainees are actual terroists and that the vast majority were not even arrested by the U.S. military. But rather were turned in by Pakastani and Afghani bounty hunters seeking financial compensation.
The film concludes with a powerful statement from the director's father Frank Gibney. He describes how, as an military interrogator in World War II and the Korean War, he and other officers were required to follow a strict code of conduct that respected the human rights of prisoners. But with this new "dark side' policy the U.S. miltary is instead following the tactics of the Communists, Fascists and even the Spanish Inquistion. They are not only ignoring the rules laid down by the Geneva Convention, but even the U.S. Constitution itself - which guarantees all prisoners the right to counsel and a speedy trial. These "dark side" tactics are not those of the United States of America that I love and believe in. Instead they are those of politicians lacking a moral compass which all Americans of conscience, liberal and conservative, should be ashamed of.
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