'Taxi to the Dark Side'
A nation betrayed, a nation's conscience stained
by Eric Mink
Dilawar was 22 when he was killed. He left behind a wife and a 2-year-old
daughter, as well as brothers, a father and the friends and neighbors who
had watched him grow into a young man in the small peanut-farming village
of
Yakubi.
Yakubi sits at latitude 33.4608 degrees north, longitude 69.99 degrees
east,
in a high valley in mountainous eastern Afghanistan. If you type those
coordinates into a Google Maps search, you can zoom in and out of
satellite
photos confirming that Yakubi is in the middle of nowhere.
Lacking a knack for farming, Dilawar - it was the only name he bore -
started driving a taxi, a used Toyota his family bought him. He died on
Dec.
10, 2002, hanging from his wrists from a wire-mesh ceiling, his arms
spread
above him, his head fallen forward and to the side, his feet barely
touching
the ground. He was alone.
The official death certificate for Dilawar, signed by coroner Dr.
Elizabeth
A. Rouse, listed the "mode of death" as "homicide." The cause was "blunt
force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease."
More descriptively, Dilawar's legs had been hit repeatedly, hundreds of
times, until the tissues inside had broken down and turned to pulp.
Internal
blood clots then had broken free, traveled to his heart, lodged in a
partially blocked artery and stopped the flow of blood.
Dilawar died in the custody of the U.S. Army at Bagram Collection Point, a
prison and interrogation facility about 30 miles north of Kabul. He had
been
there a little less than five days. Dilawar had done nothing to merit
detention and knew nothing that merited interrogation. He was beaten to
death by the United States of America.
Dilawar's story serves as the moral center of "Taxi to the Dark Side," a
non-fiction film that opens at the Tivoli Theatre in St. Louis on Feb. 22.
That is two days before the broadcast of the 80th Academy Awards in which
"Taxi" is a nominee for best do***entary feature.
Written and directed by Alex Gibney, "Taxi" is meticulously photographed,
edited and scored. As filmmaking, it is as artful as it is emotionally
involving.
Its facts, however, are not revelatory. News of Dilawar's death at Bagram
and its official classification as a homicide first appeared in a March
2003
story, datelined Yakubi, by New York Times re****ter Carlotta Gall. It took
two more years of re****ting by her stateside colleague Tim Golden, with
assistance from Gall and other re****ters, to unearth the horrific details
of
Dilawar's treatment as recounted in a 2,000-page secret criminal
investigative re****t by the Army.
Golden's extraordinary stories were published in May 2005. They explained
that local operatives of an Afghan warlord who had shelled a U.S. base had
****fted suspicion, falsely, to Dilawar and three passengers in his taxi.
American forces fell for it and took the men into custody. The three
innocent passengers eventually were ****pped to the prison at Guantanamo,
where they languished for years before being sent home. Dilawar was taken
to
Bagram.
Yet "Taxi to the Dark Side" can not be written off as old news. With the
outrage of Dilawar's torture and death as its driving narrative force,
"Taxi" gathers disparate threads and weaves them into a sharp-edged
picture
of how far from our core beliefs our country has veered in the last seven
years.
The film is methodical and relentless. It covers President Bush's
declaration - later invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court - that prisoners
held by American forces are not necessarily covered by the Geneva
Conventions. It shows Vice President Cheney on "Meet the Press" shortly
after 9/11 telling host Tim Russert, in effect, that battling terrorists
will require U.S. intelligence forces to adopt their tactics, to go to the
"dark side."
"Taxi to the Dark Side" recounts the creation of the Justice Department's
infamous torture memo of August 2002 - withdrawn in 2004, then secretly
redrafted in 2005 - redefining the term to permit almost any technique. It
includes the December 2002 authorization of extreme interrogation methods
-
later rescinded after protests from military lawyers - by then-Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and it points out that some of those methods
were
used at Bagram on Dilawar and many others.
And by no means does the film overlook the related prisoner-abuse scandal
at
Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the arbitrary denial of basic legal rights to
prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, the latter now under a second review by
the Supreme Court.
Adding to the film's force are on-camera interviews with many key players,
including former military and government officials, civilian lawyers who
have been drawn into various aspects of the story, Times re****ters Gall
and
Golden and, most chillingly, some of the U.S. soldiers who beat Dilawar.
Last summer, a former commandant of the U.S Marine Corps and a former
lawyer
who served in the White House of President Reagan wrote an oped piece for
the Wa****ngton Post denouncing an executive order issued by Bush. The
order
claims to interpret the Geneva Conventions in ways that permit extreme and
abusive treatment of prisoners by the CIA. The authors wrote that Bush's
order "compromised our national honor and . . . may well promote the
commission of war crimes by Americans."
The authors did not point out that the Military Commissions Act of 2006
includes provisions that attempt to immunize American officials -
retroactively - from responsibility for war crimes committed in
Afghanistan,
Iraq and elsewhere.
"Taxi to the Dark Side" does not rant. It does not screech. Its tone is
quietly authoritative and, in its treatment of Dilawar and his captors,
elegiac. It addresses the tragedy of Dilawar's senseless death, but it
also
finds some measure of understanding for soldiers caught up in the
whirlwind
of a chaotic war that has been mismanaged and manipulated by the military
and civilian chain of command above them.
But the film's larger point is that there is tragedy here for all
Americans.
The leaders to whom we turned after 9/11 for protection, reassurance and
wisdom turned out to be frightened little men and women who had no faith
in
the enduring strength of American principles. They betrayed our principles
and they betrayed us. History will record their steward****p as a stain on
the nation's conscience.
-Eric Mink
Copyright © 2008 St. Louis Post-Dispatch L.L.C.
From the obvious lack of thought and discussion by the rightwingers on
this
topic, I guess they all fall into that veil of 'cognitive dissonance'and
refuse to even countenance just how far this country and its citizens have
traveled into the reality of denying humanity, both for ourselves and
'others'.
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