Gerald Wright's Movie Coverage
TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE
Written/Directed by: Alex Gibney
Running time: 106 minutes
Release date: January 18, 2008
Genre: Documentary
Distributor: THINKFilm
MPAA Rating: R
(Some quotes & text taken from production notes)
The Oscar-nominated non-fiction filmmaker and director Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) confirms his standing as one of the best in his field. In this new documentary he investigates the reckless abuse of power and the grave breach of the Articles in the Geneva Convention by the Bush Administration concerning the methods of interrogation during the War on Terrorism.
This disturbing and often brutal film is the most incisive examination in the 2002 homicide of an innocent taxi driver named Dilawar and others at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan who was captured, detained, tortured and killed. Incorporating rare and never before seen footage from inside Bagram, Abu Gharlb and Guantanamo Bay prisons, and interviews with former government officials such as 2001-2003 Office of Legal Counsel John Yoo, 2001-2003 Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (former Chief of Staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell 2002-2005), interrogators, prison guards and New York Times reporters Tim Golden and Carlotta Gall who wrote the first stories about the homicides in Bagram AFB. what takes on a different spin in this film is that survivors such as former detainee Moazzam Begg (2003-2005) of the interrogations and family members of the tortured are given a platform to give their opinions and testimonies. By using documents and records of the incidents with candid testimony from eyewitnesses and participants PFC Willie Brand, SPC Eamien Corsetti, SPC Tony Lagouranis, SPC Glendale Wallis and female soldier Sgt. Selena Salcedo were labeled as the "fall guys" of the tortures all sides of the film was explained.
In 1955, the Senate unanimously gave its advice and consent to the ratification of the Geneva Conventions. In 1996, the U.S. Congress passes the War Crimes Act. The law defines a war crime to include a "grave breach of the Geneva Conventions." This law applies if either the victim or the perpetrator is a national of the U.S. or a member of the U.S. armed forces. The penalty may b e life imprisonment. Ten years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that Common Article 3 of the Third Geneva Convention applied to the War on Terrorism, with the unstated implication that any interrogation techniques that violated Common Article 3 constituted War Crimes. The text of Common Article 3 "....the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever..."
(a) Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(b) Taking of hostages;
(c) Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
(d) The passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regular constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.
As these rules and laws were being enforced worldwide, President Bush in late 2001 undermined the law and signed a top-secret finding authorizing the Department of Defense to set Special Access Program (SAP) known to only a few high-level people to kidnap or assassinate terror suspects or render them to sympathetic nations for more "coercive" interrogation. The following year he decided that detainees who are classified as terrorists (soon to be classified as unlawful combatants) are disqualified from prison of war protection under the Geneva conventions. As the FBI found this detaining unlawful, the Bush Administration assigned the task of carrying out their system to the CIA who rewrote the interrogation policy to include more aggressive techniques which caused deaths of innocent people.
This film forced me to ask the same questions as the filmmaker. Why in the face of so much evidence of the ineffectiveness of cruelty as a means of obtaining information, we insist on its use? I wonder if we in pursuing such ruthless and cruel means, lost the moral high ground that we preach in order to make ourselves feel safe? Have we lost our democratic sense of humanity? In passing of thousands of prisoners going through the system and a very high number of homicides occurring I wonder if what we are doing is setting a bad example? What ever answers the viewer comes to, they will find this is a powerful investigative documentary exposing the rules and laws we live by.
FILM RATING (B+)
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