Taxi to the Dark Side

From AwardAnnals

Film:	Taxi to the Dark Side
Director:	Alex Gibney
Honors:	2008 Oscar-Documentary winner Score: 10.58
Genres:	Documentary films
Distributor:	Revolver Entertainment

Taxi to the Dark Side is a gripping investigation into the reckless abuse of power by the Bush Administration. By probing the homicide of an innocent taxi driver at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, the film exposes a worldwide policy of detention and interrogation that condones torture and the abrogation of human rights. This disturbing and often brutal film is the most incisive examination to date of the Bush Administration’s willingness, in its prosecution of the “war on terror,” to undermine the essence of the rule of law. The film asks and answers a key question: what happens when a few men use the wartime powers of the executive to undermine the very principles on which the United States was founded.

Incorporating rare and never-before-seen images from inside the Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons, and interviews with former government officials such as John Yoo, Alberto Mora and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, interrogators, prison guards, New York Times reporters Tim Golden and Carlotta Gall (who blew the lid off the abuse taking place in Afghanistan) and the families of tortured prisoners, the film dissects the progression of the Administration’s policy on torture from the secret role of key administration figures, such as Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales and others to the soldiers in the field.

In the face of thousands of prisoners passing through the system, an astonishing number of admitted homicides, and a hastily drafted law—the Military Commissions Act—that grants immunity to government officials for crimes against humanity while denying the fundamental right of habeas corpus to others, Taxi to the Dark Side forces us to ask why, in the face of so much evidence of the ineffectiveness of cruelty as a means of obtaining information, we sought to insist on its use? Have we, by pursuing such ruthless means, lost the moral high ground in the war on terror and made ourselves less safe? Even more important, have we compromised our own sense of humanity, our democratic values and our effectiveness as a world leader?

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