Taxi To The Dark Side

  Winner of the 2008 Oscar for Best Documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side tells the disturbing story of the torture policy under the Bush administration during the Second Gulf War.  This film features riveting interviews with former military "interrogators" who have since been found guilty in criminal court for the tactics they implemented in order to acquire information from POWs at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram and Abu Ghraib Prisons.  First-hand experience of the use of torturous detention strategies is provided by Moazzam Begg, a former prisoner at Gitmo and Bagram, in painful detail.
  The name of the movie centers around the story of a 22-year old Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar who was taken prisoner by American soldiers when he was escorting three passengers in Khost Province, Afghanistan.  The car was stopped at a checkpoint and the four men were taken to Bagram Prison, where they were brutally tortured.  Dilawar, who the U.S. military suspected had a hand in an attack at an Army base earlier that morning, was dead five days after arriving at Bagram.  He and the other men were victims of deplorable interrogation techniques, which included:

• sleep deprivation
• prisoners were handcuffed to the ceiling, so every time they nodded off, the pain of the handcuffs would wake them back up
• prisoners were forced to stand on a very small platform while soldiers would attach electrical wires to their fingertips and told if they stepped or fell off the platform, they would be electrocuted
• sexual abuse
• forced nudity
• forced masturbation
• blindfolds, earplugs, hoods and large mittens were used on prisoners for sensory deprivation (A Montreal psychologist said in the film that this strategy can drive a person insane in less than two days)
• blasting loud music in prisoners' holding cells for hours on end
• fear targeting
• vicious dogs were brought in and chained just inches from prisoners' faces
• snakes were used
• female interrogators were used to infuriate prisoners whose culture prevented them from respecting women who were in positions of power
• waterboarding (pouring water down a prisoner's throat to simulate a drowning sensation)
• right after 9/11, the CIA got approval to waterboard detainees
• stress positions
• prisoners were forced to stand for several days
• prisoners were hung upside down from the ceiling for many hours
• prisoners were forced to hold their arms out to their sides for long periods of time

   Led by the authority of Vice-President Dick Cheney, American troops were ordered to ignore the protocols laid out in the Geneva Conventions.  When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Bush's bill that would allow American soldiers to hold detainees in prisons without a hearing, the administration simply helped the military establish its own "combatant status review tribunals," which essentially found a way to imprison suspects without giving them their right to an attorney, a fair trial or due process.  Congress then reiterated to the administration that soldiers must follow the Geneva treaties, which Bush agreed to as long as he could be the one who defined the phrase "outrageous acts against humans."
   When photos from Abu Ghraib Prison were released to the American public in 2004, 35 percent of U.S. citizens still approved of the use of torture, which this film attributes to the popularity of shows like 24.  Citing a specific example from this documentary, torture proponents would argue that it is acceptable to use whatever means necessary to get information from someone who knows the location of a ticking time bomb.  Opponents would argue that if authorities were actually able to catch a person who is crazy enough to plant a bomb while the bomb is still ticking (which is an incredibly unlikely scenario, outside of movies or television), he/she would probably be willing to die before giving up information on how to dismantle the explosive. 
  Taxi to the Dark Side is a sad and eye-opening documentary that sheds a lot of light on what interrogation methods Rumsfeld, Cheney and company considered invaluable in extracting information from the enemy.  Towards the end of the film, we are told that Bush signed a bill that pardoned him and his administration from any crimes surrounding war-time torture - these pardons did not extend to the soldiers in charge of executing the actual interrogations.  No officers were ever convicted in the Dilawar case, but all of the lower-ranking interrogators interviewed for this film have been relieved of their duties in the U.S. military and have been convicted for crimes committed while following orders from the men and women in charge.