Rewind – 2007 in Film: Taxi to the Dark Side

In 2001, I was twelve years old. When 9/11 occurred I had been on holiday in a holiday park with my grandparents. My day had been spent playing on the beach with my younger brother and sister. I recall returning in the afternoon for a snack only to be greeted by the sight of my grandparents watching the news in silence. I couldn’t quite believe the footage being shown on TV. Airplanes flying into two skyscrapers, all the way across the sea. Even though I couldn’t comprehend the seriousness of the event that was occurring, there was no denying the fact that summer was over.

Just over a year later, the war on terror had begun and the news was now showing footage of Afghan invasion. To a young millennial growing up in the early 2000s, you were under the assumption that the government always told the truth to the public. Upon reflection, all these years later I realize that politics was and has always been complicated. There have always been conspiracies and cover-ups, and the situation in 2002 was anything different.

Alex Gibney’s gripping documentary Taxi to the Dark Side tells of one such cover-up, that the US government fought to keep it from the public eye. The film tells of an Afghan taxi driver called Dilawar. In December 2002, Dilawar picked up some passengers in his taxi only to be accused of being a terrorist connected to a recent rocket attack. Despite a lack of evidence, he was taken to the American prison at Bagram, Afghanistan. For five days he was tortured so violently that he would succumb to his injuries. An autopsy showed that his legs were so badly injured as a result of being kicked repeatedly, that doctors would have had to amputate them should he had lived.

The official report said Dilawar died of “natural causes.” However, The New York Times discovered an autopsy report describing the death as a homicide. An investigation was conducted in which a small handful of U.S. soldiers were accused of the murder. No officers were involved. Dilawar was the first casualty of a much larger issue. The next shocking tale of torture and abuse to emerge was the infamous Abu Ghraib incident.

In all the torture scandals since few officers have ever been charged. And victims and their families have not been able to receive justice for what has occurred. The documentary is at its strongest and most effective when we return to Dilawar’s family still reeling from the loss of their father, son, and brother. These are very real people trying to rebuild their lives after enduring something that we can only imagine. Taxi to the Dark Side is the story of one man’s tragic case that we know about. How many more ‘Dilawar’s’ are there out there?

Gibney examines the chain of responsibility that reaches down from the commander in chief in the White House through the Pentagon to the lowest prison guard and interrogator. There is a web of lies at play here. A chilling reminder that the dinner scene from Adam McKay’s Vice is more fact than it is fiction. Gibney also turns the attention to the illegal detainees at Guantanamo. Many of them have never been charged with any crime and have been denied trial.

There are also interviews with former administration officials and spokesmen who resigned in act of protest against what they had encountered. However, it is the interviews with the torturers themselves which are the most heartbreaking and eye-opening. These were young men, barely out of their teens. Given very limited training and a vague description of their job role, they were led to believe that they were doing their duty. Gibney also includes never before seen photos and images of torture at work and there are all-too-real reenactments of the incidents which make for difficult viewing.

Taxi to the Dark Side still makes an impact all these years later and it’s lost none of its original impact. The documentary went on to win the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. To finish this piece I wish to use Gibney’s acceptance speech that he made at the Oscars which reminds us all that we should never allow ourselves to give into that darkness.

This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us, Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and my father, a navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law. Let’s hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and back to the light