Film

The most surprising thing about Taxi to the Dark Side may be that there’s nothing surprising in it: Seven years of executive secrecy and power abuses will alter expectations. In any case, this new film from Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) takes a multifaceted approach toward dissecting the rationale for torture, starting with a case in which a taxi driver was killed at an American base in Afghanistan and following it to the core of the Bush administration’s political philosophy.

Interviewing soldiers, professors and civil servants, Gibney argues that loosened definitions of torture create a slippery slope, and that ambiguity reinforces itself. Careful wording by Bush’s legal team creates a situation in which torture equates only to “extreme acts”—a phrase that is never clearly defined. Soldiers aren’t given adequate instructions, and therefore have plausible deniability if a case ever comes to trial. Torture can be dismissed as “degradation,” but if that weren’t appalling enough, experts demonstrate that the line is increasingly thin. Guaranteed by the Supreme Court, habeas corpus at Guantánamo exists only for show. And of course, torture yields false information.

As one interviewed lawyer suggests, the system doesn’t extract intelligence; it merely perpetuates the illusion that the War on Terror has been successful. By the end of this damning and skillfully presented film, it’s difficult not to agree.