Review of Taxi to the Dark Side (2008) by Eric H — 21 Jun 2015

In 2005's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room", documentarian Alex Gibney accomplished a mightily impressive feat---making the story of energy company Enron's bankruptcy and accounting fraud surprisingly comprehensible and interesting.

With his latest doc, the Oscar-winning "Taxi to the Dark Side," Gibney employs the same thoroughness to examine another from-the-headlines topic: the post-911 use of torture by the CIA and US forces to interrogate suspected terrorists (and the slimy Bush-administration-era policy-tweaking that's enabled the Geneva Convention-violating practice to thrive).

The film's centered around the story of Dilawar, a taxi driver who was wrongfully imprisoned as a potential terrorist in a US-run facility in Afghanistan, and subsequently died there, after sustaining multiple leg beatings.

Skillful Gibney uses Dilawar's story as the hook for a more far-reaching treatise---one that also visits Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and takes to task the current US anti-terrorism measures, which are governed by a mess of hazy regulations that permit lengthy imprisonment without proper trial or defense and various human-dignity-denying interrogation techniques.

As one talking head puts it, speaking of Dilawar: "There's a lot of other people out there who are gonna run into this system unless it's fixed. And you only need one to...remind yourself of what it's capable of.

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