Taxi to the Dark Side

This Academy Award-winning documentary (which won earlier ths year and which I watched tonight) beat out my favorite, "No End in Sight," the anatomy of how the United States went wrong to go into war in Iraq and how the Iraq war itself went wrong. In a sense, this is a companion piece, the story both of how a young Afghan cab driver (pictured above to the right) got tortured to death in U.S. custody and how a whole network, rationale, and regimen of torture (both psychological and physical - as the two merge and overlap) developed, particularly in Afghanistan, Iraq, and more than anywhere else Guantanamo Bay. We'll see how the new Harold and Kumar movie treat Guatanamo Bay. And, of course, it's treated as a great place in the other documentary that "Taxi" beat out for the Oscar, Michael Moore's "Sicko." "No End in Sight" shares with "Taxi" an overlapping set of villains - the "axis of evil" - Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, President Bush, Secretary Powell, then National Security Advisory Rice, and - unlike in "No End in Sight" - a set of lawyers and generals who justified and implemented torture from above, then stood aside as a few enlisted people got in trouble on the rare occasions that it went awry and anyone got blamed for it. (On the top of the bad lawyer list: John Woo, and later Attorney General Gonzalez.) (Some of the most chilling scenes in the movie - which includes some apparently staged scenes - come in interviews with entlisted people who did the torturing - including the killing of the taxi driver - clearly not guilty of being a terrorist (in fact, it later turned out that a U.S. "ally" warload was shelling U.S. bases in Afghanistan, then rounding up unsuspecting civilians and blaming them in order to collect reward money from the U.S.) - who were later tried and convicted by the U.S. military - as they chillingly and remorsefully recount their deeds. It's also chilling to watch U.S. policymakers and lawyers continue to justify and obsfucate on torture.) (It's also chilling to watch the intellectual/social scientific research that begat "psychological warfare" and eventually torture: sleep deprivation, standing for 40 hours straight, sensory deprivation, and - eventually - sexual/gender humiliation and - reaching back to the Middle Ages - waterboarding (simulated drowing - a chilling still picture showed a place where the Khmer Rouge carried out waterboarding during the "killing fileds' time)(and - in the tax driver's case - repeated beatings). But, really, it becomes clear: we're all to blame. The documentary briefly shows scenes of the hugely successful Fox TV series, "24," as the lead character, played by Kiefer Sutherland, tortures alleged terrorists. It also shows Vice President Cheney drily and President Bush almost casually, in his cowboy way, justify torture (without using that word, of course), including in addresses to Congress as all of Congress - including Senator Clinton - give him a standing ovation. The term "the dark side" comes from some of Cheney's remarks, about where we have to go in the new war on terror. The movie also overlaps with the fictional "Rendition," the poorly selling movie from last year that shows the entire of cycle of torture with an individual, and sympathetic victim. It's clear from the movie that torture rarely gets us good information, that it leaves rights and the rule of law trampled in its wake, and it also turns many people in Iraq and Afghanistan - if they weren't already against us - against us - and tears away at our very souls. Equally chilling scenes show Senator John McCain - who the North Vietnamese tortured for 6 1/2 years in the "Hanoi Hotel" - speak on camera from a prison cell, in 1968, then speak out against torture in Congress. Late in the movie, however, even McCain - looking for the Republican nomination for president - buckles to White House pressure and supports a bill that throws him and torture opponents a few morsels but essentially gives the Administration the green light to continue to do what it's been doing at least since the weeks after 9/11: empower the state in a kind of Foucauldian way to gain extreme discretion and extreme power and to let Americans either directly or vicariously act out all of our fears and hostility towards Muslims, towards Middle Easterners, towards people of color, towards people from other countries, and towards people who question U.S. military and economic power and secular, consumerist, and corporate culture. (Michel Foucault was a French philosopher and sociologist who analyzed how prisons and punishment shifted from physical torture to more subtle (and often internalized) surveillance/self-surveillance of which Weber's Protestant ethic was a prime example. But our post-9/11 strategy mixes "modern" psychological techniuqes with old-fashioned Medieval physical torture (even if at some level the more psychological torture is - in some ways - preferable to the more physical torture - for example, depicted in "Syriana.")