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Taxi to the Dark Side

Torture in the shadows

By GERALD PEARY | February 6, 2008

3.5 Stars

Taxi to the Dark Side

In 2002, an Afghani jitney driver named Dilawar took off with two customers and disappeared. Days later, he was found dead, after having been tortured by the American soldiers who'd detained him in Bagram Prison. The unconscionable maltreatment of this obscure Afghan becomes, in this superb, tough-minded, investigative documentary by Alex Gibney, a metaphor for America’s ignominious torture policy, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Guantánamo Bay. What had been fostered for decades by the CIA came to bloom with the rule of George W. Bush and his cohort: a willful abandonment of the Geneva Convention rules regarding political prisoners. Dick Cheney articulated the policy, speaking on Meet the Press after 9/11: “We have to do things on the dark side, spend time in the shadows.” This Best Documentary Oscar nominee offers telling interviews with soldiers describing the gruesome things they’ve done to detainees under the Bush administration’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” torture philosophy. Do you believe that Cheney, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, et al. should be shipped to the Hague for a war-crimes trial? There’s all the show-cause evidence you need in this assiduously investigated, brilliantly argued documentary from the astute filmmaker of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. 106 minutes | Kendall Square

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