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"Taxi to the Dark Side": How Did America Become a Country That Tortures?
By Cynthia Fuchs
PopMatters
Wednesday 20 February 2008
Alex Gibney's Oscar winning film documents
the Bush Administration's reckless disregard for human rights and the rule of
law.
They're a very frail people and I was surprised it had taken that
long for one of 'em to die in our custody.
- Pfc. Damien Corsetti,
Military Intelligence, Bagram
If the FBI had felt that there was a case to answer for, they wouldn't have
taken me into Bagram where I was held, heard the sounds of a woman screaming
next door, had me hogtied and threatened to send me to Egypt in order to get
me to sign this.
- Moazzam Begg, Now 2006 July 28
In December 2002, a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar was picked
up and delivered to the Bagram Air Force Base prison. Five days later, he was
dead. Sgt. Thomas Curtis, one of the Military Police at Bagram, remembers, "There
was definitely a sense of concern because he was the second one. You wonder,
was it something we did?"
As detailed in Alex Gibney's devastating documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side,
Dilawar's demise was officially termed a homicide, like the first detainee to
die at Bagram, Habibullah. Captured by a warlord and handed over to the U.S.
just days before Dilawar, Habibullah as deemed "an important prisoner,"
hooded, shackled, and isolated, periodically beaten for "noncompliance."
Autopsies showed that Dilawar and Habibullah suffered similar abuses, including
deep bruises all over their bodies; according to the Army coroner, Dilawar suffered
"massive tissue damage to his legs ... his legs had been pulpified."
And yet, despite initial concerns among the guards and interrogators at Bagram
over an investigation, instead, the officer in charge of interrogation at the
prison, Captain Carolyn Wood, was awarded a Bronze Star for Valor and, following
the Iraq invasion in 2003, she and her unit were sent to Abu Ghraib.
Methodically, relentlessly, Gibney's Oscar-nominated film assembles stories,
evidence, and testimony from witnesses and experts (its deliberate structure
recalls that of Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, both films suggesting that,
if the Bush Administration had not already put in place legal protections, more
than one member might be subject to criminal charges). The many decisions and
oversights that produced the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that
would be used at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and other sites have several
points of departure, each chilling in its own way. Not least among these is
the pronouncement by Dick Cheney that motivates Taxi's title, made during an
appearance on Meet the Press during the week after 9/11. Describing imminent
changes in interrogation policies, the vice president asserted,
We have to work sort of the dark side, if you will, spend time in the shadows
in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to
be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods available
to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the world
these folks operate in. It'll be vital for us to use any means at our disposal,
basically, to achieve our objective.
This working of the "dark side" would be both notorious and secret,
planned and haphazard, illegal and, in some instances, calculated to toe a seeming
legal line. Above all, the film argues, the work was instigated and often overseen
by military officers and administration officials, who created a "fog of
ambiguity, coupled with great pressure to bring results," such that young,
untrained soldiers were following orders that were not spelled out. Chief among
these sources of confusion is the January 2002 torture memo" written by
John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel,
advising the suspension of the Geneva Conventions in cases deemed appropriate
by the president. Taxi describes the memo as giving "legal cover for the
CIA and Special Forces to embark on a secret program of previously forbidden
interrogation techniques," including the use of dogs, nudity, stress positions,
sleep deprivation and waterboarding. This even as military lawyers disputed
such methods, especially as the use of such "extreme acts" left soldiers
vulnerable to criminal charges - though, as it has turned out, those who directed
them have not been subject to prosecutions.
Working the "dark side" demands such hierarchy, so that the U.S.
can continue to put on a show of "justice" and fairness; as Donald
Rumsfeld declared following the exposure of photos from Abu Ghraib, "The
world will see how a democratic system a free system functions and operates,
transparently, with no cover-ups." The trials that resulted, however, have
covered up all kinds of responsibility, what with Pfc. Lynndie England sentenced
to three years imprisonment (paroled after 521 days) and Spc. Charles Graner
to 10 years. As the film notes in one of its resonant section titles, England
and Graner were not only "bad apples." As Spc. Tony Lagouranis, of
Military Intelligence in Iraq, puts it, "Obviously what they were doing
in those pictures was not sanctioned by the military rules of engagement, and
they weren't interrogators. So yes, I did think that they were bad apples. However,
I also think that they were taking cues from intel."
While most charges associated with the Dilawar and Habibullah cases were dropped,
several soldiers pled guilty or were convicted, including Pfc. Willie Brand,
Spc. Brian Cammack, and Sgt, Anthony Morden (who notes in the film that this
process allowed the Army "to get a public opinion that they were policing
their soldiers"). But such cases, the movie submits, are only covering
up broader policy. At Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantánamo, the "chain
of command" has not subverted by the use of torture; rather, it has been
reasserted. (here it's worth noting that, even as some experts and even some
politicians are calling for Guantánamo's closing, Bagram is expanding.)
As Rear Admiral John Hutson describes it, "What starts at the top of the
chain of command drops like a rock down the chain of command, and that's why
Lynndie England knew what Donald Rumsfeld was thinking without actually talking
to Donald Rumsfeld." All interviewees in Taxi assert that torture does
not produce useful intelligence (the most egregious case noted here is that
of Abi Faraj al-Libbi, whose coerced and inaccurate "confession" of
ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda found its way into Colin Powell's infamous
speech at the United Nations in 2003). The film suggests that its pervasiveness
in popular culture (exemplified by scenes from 24) has led to what Alfred McCoy
(A Question of Torture) calls "a constituency for torture that allows the
Bush White House to get away with the way it twists laws and treaties."
Such twisting is denounced in the film by lawyers for detainees and former detainee
Moazzam Begg, who recalls "one of the strangest requests" made to
him during his two years detained, namely, that he identify soldiers who abused
Dilawar and agree to testify against them in court (this while he was unable
to get access to a lawyer or court proceedings for himself; he was released
in 2005, under pressure by the British government).
The film includes examples of other, frankly astounding twists, including the
designation of detainees as NEC (Not Enemy Combatants) or later, NLEC (No Longer
Enemy Combatants), patently senseless labels that turn time and logic inside
out. As Begg's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, says, NLEC means "We want
to say they were guilty to begin with, but now we've had a change of heart,
so they're not guilty anymore, but we were right in the first place." Detention
hinges on lack of information: according to Rear Admiral James McGarrah, of
the Office of Administrative Review for Detained Enemy Combatants, "[Detainees]
may not ever know [the evidence against them], but that doesn't eliminate the
opportunity they have to make a case for why if they were returned in the future,
why they would not continue to pose a threat."
All this twisting lays ground for future problems. According to Jack Cloonan,
FBI Special Agent from 1977-2002, "We don't know what revenge is coming
down the road." Indeed, he says, the most effective way to "incite
the faithful" would be to show the photo of England holding the dog leash,
"and just point to that, and look at the young brothers and say you're
duty-bound now to get revenge." While Cloonan here casts blame on the "extreme
interrogators," he also alludes to what he later calls "a certain
level of prejudice, that this religion and the people who have hijacked it have
such a disregard for life that we turn around and say if they think so little
of life - and clearly, 9/11 exemplified that - screw them. Anything goes."
Taxi to the Dark Side insists on an accounting for this "anything."
And for all its brilliant dissecting of U.S. policy, practice, and cover-up,
it closes with an effort to make Dilawar visible once again. Effaced from the
trials in which some of his torturers were named, he is represented here by
his family, embodiments of the "human dignity" and commitment to "inalienable
rights" lost during this long, slow, ongoing journey to the dark side.
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