The horrors detailed in Alex Gibney's fierce and factually unassailable new documentary are sickening to recount, but necessary to see. Gibney's focus is war-on-terror-inspired torture, and his findings are more damning than the biggest Bush hater might imagine. The taxi of the title was the means of employment for an Afghani named Dilawar. Mistaken for someone with a grudge against the West, Dilawar wound up at the Air Force encampment in Bagram. Starved, beaten, chained by his arms to the ceiling of his holding cell, he died before anyone officially accused him of wrongdoing.
The vile fact is that the cabbie's story is not unique. Gibney contextualizes Dilawar's death with evidence that interrogators at Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo were reading from the same torture textbooks. There are, of course, countless moral issues to consider when discussing torture, but for those who believe the international rules for dealing with detainees don't apply post-9/11, Gibney offers another (obvious but often overlooked) consideration: it's impossible to know when a bloodied, exhausted and terrified captive — innocent or not — has had enough and simply says what he thinks his jailers want to hear. A quick look at recent American history makes clear just what kind of damage can be wrought when a government acts on bad intelligence. — Kevin Canfield
