Anybody see "Cool Hand Luke" (1967) with Paul Newman as an inmate at a small southern prison camp? That's the one in which a guard tells Luke, "You got to get your mind right." A gripping movie, comic and then tragic. The guards, led by the pock-faced "man with no eyes", are real mean mothers. For infractions of the rules or any sassy backtalk, they lock Luke up in "the box", an upright wooden shelter the size of a one-hole outhouse, with only a pail for company. He's held there in the blistering heat for 24 hours. When Luke gets more uppity they simply beat hell out of him.
Well, all of that is peanuts compared to what went on in our detainee camps at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Gitmo -- not to mention the CIA-maintained black holes in countries known around the world for their humane treatment of prisoners, such as Egypt and Bulgaria.
The detainees at Bagram and Abu Ghraib -- only 10 percent of whom were picked up by coalition forces, the rest being turned over to us by Afghanis or Pakinstanis, sometimes for bounty -- were not subject to any questioning before being thrown into solitary confinement and held there not for 24 hours, like Luke, but for weeks. They were shackled to the ceiling, forced to assume stress positions, beaten on the legs, waterboarded and forced to undergo many of the other horrors we associate with the Inquisition.
But that's an old story by now. This film doesn't really tell us much that we hadn't known or guessed, except that it was worse than we imagined. It begins and ends with the case of Dilawar, a taxi driver who left his family to drive to the provincial capitol and show off his new car and wound up in Bagram where he was killed -- one of 37 homicides so far acknowledged by the US Army. His legs were "pulpified" according to the Army's medical examiner.
There are three fundamental issues involved in the application of enhanced interrogation techniques. (1) Do they work? (2) Are they moral? (3) Are they legal? "Taxi to the Dark Side", for most of its length, seems to focus on the first question. Does torture work? Well, no it doesn't.
That is to say, it's worthless if your goal is to get accurate information out of your subjects. But it may be well worthwhile if your aim to exact revenge upon people who look like the lunatics who flew airplanes into the WTC in 2001, people who speak the same language and come from the same area, the Middle East. Boy, are those Middle East folks alien to us. The language sounds like they're clearing their throats. They wear tablecloths on their heads. They dream of 72 virgins in Paradise. If you want revenge, these are your targets alright. I doubt that one out of a hundred Americans could walk up to a blank map on the wall and put his finger on Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Syria. We don't know anything about geography but we know what we don't like.
The enlisted men who were tried for some of the crimes and interviewed for this film wouldn't say exactly that. For those who were willing to talk about it, they claim that their orders were vague. No officer was ever charged, while the enlisted men wound up with prison terms and BCDs.
Also not spoken about -- probably because nobody knows about it -- are the taken-for-granted assumptions about relationships between guards and prisoners. It's all very well for us, sitting at home in our Naugahide recliners, to feel angry at the way the untrained and ill-led MPs performed but, as one of them says, "Try going over there and saying that." He's right. It has to do with role playing. It's not my opinion. It's established experimental fact. I refer anyone interested to Philip Zimbardo's famous "prison experiment" in the 1950s. It's probably available on Google.
Well, you might ask, does anyone come out of this perfectly serious description of perfectly despicable acts looking good? Yes, in fact. The representative of the FBI argues persuasively that his agency was able to step out of the box and recognize what was happening. And a couple of politicians, like John McCain, coming late to the game expressed their disapproval in public.
One is tempted to compare it to Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure" but they're different movies with different ends in mind. Morris avoids easy judgments and asks in his usual philosophical way what the photos from Abu Ghraib "mean". This film is more interested in demonstrating what went on in the prison. I expected it to be an abusive moral diatribe but it turned out to be pretty instructive. We all know about the mistreatment, but I, at least, had never understood how endemic and intense it was. I give Gibney credit for not taking the easy route of bashing the suits in Washington more than they deserve, for not making fools of them more than they've done themselves. Only once, during a guided tour of Guantanamo Bay, does he turn sarcastic. As the cheerful guide (it's like a tour of Universal Studios) shows us the neat little cells with the neatly made bed and the comfortable slippers and the box of checkers on the night table, the pop tune "My Little Corner of the World" plays in the background -- ancient and mindless, kind of like torture.
A depressing movie underneath it all.
Well, all of that is peanuts compared to what went on in our detainee camps at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Gitmo -- not to mention the CIA-maintained black holes in countries known around the world for their humane treatment of prisoners, such as Egypt and Bulgaria.
The detainees at Bagram and Abu Ghraib -- only 10 percent of whom were picked up by coalition forces, the rest being turned over to us by Afghanis or Pakinstanis, sometimes for bounty -- were not subject to any questioning before being thrown into solitary confinement and held there not for 24 hours, like Luke, but for weeks. They were shackled to the ceiling, forced to assume stress positions, beaten on the legs, waterboarded and forced to undergo many of the other horrors we associate with the Inquisition.
But that's an old story by now. This film doesn't really tell us much that we hadn't known or guessed, except that it was worse than we imagined. It begins and ends with the case of Dilawar, a taxi driver who left his family to drive to the provincial capitol and show off his new car and wound up in Bagram where he was killed -- one of 37 homicides so far acknowledged by the US Army. His legs were "pulpified" according to the Army's medical examiner.
There are three fundamental issues involved in the application of enhanced interrogation techniques. (1) Do they work? (2) Are they moral? (3) Are they legal? "Taxi to the Dark Side", for most of its length, seems to focus on the first question. Does torture work? Well, no it doesn't.
That is to say, it's worthless if your goal is to get accurate information out of your subjects. But it may be well worthwhile if your aim to exact revenge upon people who look like the lunatics who flew airplanes into the WTC in 2001, people who speak the same language and come from the same area, the Middle East. Boy, are those Middle East folks alien to us. The language sounds like they're clearing their throats. They wear tablecloths on their heads. They dream of 72 virgins in Paradise. If you want revenge, these are your targets alright. I doubt that one out of a hundred Americans could walk up to a blank map on the wall and put his finger on Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Syria. We don't know anything about geography but we know what we don't like.
The enlisted men who were tried for some of the crimes and interviewed for this film wouldn't say exactly that. For those who were willing to talk about it, they claim that their orders were vague. No officer was ever charged, while the enlisted men wound up with prison terms and BCDs.
Also not spoken about -- probably because nobody knows about it -- are the taken-for-granted assumptions about relationships between guards and prisoners. It's all very well for us, sitting at home in our Naugahide recliners, to feel angry at the way the untrained and ill-led MPs performed but, as one of them says, "Try going over there and saying that." He's right. It has to do with role playing. It's not my opinion. It's established experimental fact. I refer anyone interested to Philip Zimbardo's famous "prison experiment" in the 1950s. It's probably available on Google.
Well, you might ask, does anyone come out of this perfectly serious description of perfectly despicable acts looking good? Yes, in fact. The representative of the FBI argues persuasively that his agency was able to step out of the box and recognize what was happening. And a couple of politicians, like John McCain, coming late to the game expressed their disapproval in public.
One is tempted to compare it to Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure" but they're different movies with different ends in mind. Morris avoids easy judgments and asks in his usual philosophical way what the photos from Abu Ghraib "mean". This film is more interested in demonstrating what went on in the prison. I expected it to be an abusive moral diatribe but it turned out to be pretty instructive. We all know about the mistreatment, but I, at least, had never understood how endemic and intense it was. I give Gibney credit for not taking the easy route of bashing the suits in Washington more than they deserve, for not making fools of them more than they've done themselves. Only once, during a guided tour of Guantanamo Bay, does he turn sarcastic. As the cheerful guide (it's like a tour of Universal Studios) shows us the neat little cells with the neatly made bed and the comfortable slippers and the box of checkers on the night table, the pop tune "My Little Corner of the World" plays in the background -- ancient and mindless, kind of like torture.
A depressing movie underneath it all.