April
25
Taxi to the Dark Side's Gibney Attacks Gonzales
Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) had an opportunity to scrutinize U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for his new doc Taxi to the Dark Side, which examines torture in Afghanistan, Guantanamo and Iraq. Incorporating never-before-seen images from inside the Bagram, Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons and interviews with high-ranking officials such as John Yoo, Alberto Mora and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, low-ranking interrogators at the Abu Ghraib and Bagram Prisons, NYT reporters Tim Golden and Carlotta Gall and the families of tortured prisoners, it is the first film to detail the arc of the Bush Administration’s policy on torture. Executive produced by Sidney Blumenthal, the film debuts Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival.
At The Huffington Post, Gibney answers the question: Is Gonzales stupid? The answer is no!
Here's one early response to Taxi to the Dark Side from The Village Voice:
Taxi to the Dark Side, which Gibney teasingly introduced to the crowd as a "murder mystery that leads from Afghanistan to Washington," is an indictment of U.S. torture culture that employs much of the same material as Rory Kennedy's recent Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, although its approach is less psychological than brutalizing. To its credit, Dark Side's eye-for-an-eye-for-an-eye tale forgoes intellectualism in favor of blunt trauma; the only appropriate response to its punishing litany of abuses, unmistakably ordered by Pentagon and White House bullies, is...well, rage.
UPDATE: Here's Andrew Sullivan's response to Taxi to the Dark Side:
Alex Gibney's new documentary on the legalization and authorization of torture by the Bush administration debuts this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival. See the trailer here. It's a well-crafted piece of work and a devastating exposure of the denial that still runs rampant in some quarters about what has actually been done in the name of the American people these past few years. Longtime readers of this blog know all too well many of the details - but this film does what a parasitic blog cannot, and what even all the innovative reporting on the subject has not yet been able to do. It puts it all together. It represents a moment in this war when we can actually stop and look back from rising ground, and see how far we have come from the civilized norms of warfare that the United States represented in the last century. Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld tore off that civilized veneer and repudiated that long and honorable history. From the details of approved interrogation techniques replicated by scapegoats at Abu Ghraib to the self-conscious attempts to dissemble and deceive about the Rubicon we've crossed to the simple facts of the percentage of captives at Gitmo who were actually seized by U.S. forces - a small fraction of the total - you see conscious, orchestrated sadism at work. It's a film that enrages and shocks. But it has all been in front of our noses.I watched the whole thing intently and quietly to the end. But its final coda contains a small clip of Gibney's late father, a longtime military interrogator, and his views on what has been done to his honorable profession by the Bush White House. Alone, it made me weep. It struck a chord that still resonates: of one thing mainly, and one thing still unavoidably. Shame. Almost unspeakable shame.
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I watched this film last night on Australia's sbs, i was furious and a million other emotions ran through me. God help America, because no one else will.
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