A Talk with Alex Gibney: Director of Taxi to the Dark Side

Alex Gibney's Academy Award-nominated documentary Taxi to the Dark Side

Note: This article on documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney appeared last month in Venice Magazine. Today, he received a well-deserved Oscar nod in the Best Documentary Feature Category for Taxi to the Dark Side, his disturbing investigation into torture in American prisons during wartime, that being now. His previous directorial doc, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, is also a masterwork of investigative journalism.

Taxi Driver
Alex Gibney’s new documentary on torture is a harrowing new ride you won’t want to take. But you have to.
By Terry Keefe

About six weeks before he passed away, Alex Gibney’s father, once a Naval interrogator during World War II, and later a journalist himself, unhooked his oxygen tank and asked his filmmaker son to get his video camera. Frank Gibney wished to speak about the subject of torture and how outraged he was at the revelations about the use of torture on prisoners in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Afghanistan. Specifically, the elder Gibney directed his indignation at the leaders (you know them, but for the record, they include George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzalez), who he believed the buck stopped with. Frank Gibney had interrogated Japanese prisoners during the battle of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest, and although they were dealing with that era’s version of suicide bombers in the form of kamikaze pilots, Gibney and his fellow soldiers chose not to cross the line into brutality. When asked why not by his son, Frank Gibney replied that to do so would be to sacrifice the very values they were fighting for. Alex Gibney elaborates, “It’s not to say that there weren’t suspensions of human rights during World War II. The Japanese Internment Camps in particular come to mine. But it was so far from my father’s frame of reference that FDR would have condoned torture. One of the things that he was fighting for, particularly against the Japanese, who did torture prisoners, was for a better possibility.” Alex Gibney’s interview with his father closes his new documentary on the use of torture during the War on Terror, entitled Taxi to the Dark Side, a film which should be required viewing for every American, from the highest towers of political power to the youngest soldiers in the field. Gibney’s latest continues his examination of the force of corruption, explored via the business world previously in his documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and how it virals itself into every part of an organization, whether that be a company or a country, when immorality is left unchecked, or condoned, by the people at the top of the power structure.

The taxi cab referenced in the title was driven by an Afghan named Dilawar, who was taken prisoner as a suspected terrorist by the military and brought to the air base at Bagram, where he was tortured and eventually died. It turned out that Dilawar was innocent, a fact that was known by his interrogators towards the end of his life. But they continued to abuse him anyway, largely because Dilawar had been stuck inside an organizational culture of torture that knew few boundaries and was sanctioned at the highest levels. Says Gibney, “Structurally, the story of Dilawar allowed me to show the breath of the policy, a relentless torture mechanism that corrupts everything in its path.“ Indeed, although Dilawar himself never left Afghanistan, the passengers in his cab, also suspected terrorists, were brought to Guantanamo and tortured. And that same system of torture, when used in Guantanamo on the suspected “20th Hijacker” of 9/11, Mohamed al-Qahtani, eventually extracted statements about links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, which Colin Powell later used in his now-infamous U.N. speech in the lead-up to the current Iraq War. And who knows whether the information al-Qahtani provided was true? A man who is getting waterboarded might say anything. “The one thing we know about torture is that the interrogator gets what he wants to hear,“ explains Gibney. “And I think that became appealing for the Bush administration over time. It became a mechanism, conscious or unconscious for them, which got them back the info they wanted to hear. That’s a terrifying idea. That’s the Soviet Union. That’s the gulag. You’re intentionally seeking false confessions to confirm your beliefs.” He goes on to say, “People were stating for years that this was just a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib. But it was a much more pervasive policy. It gets into the corruption of the American character.”