A US walk on the dark side

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Take a Taxi to the Dark Side. It’s a grim documentary, and you may think you know already that you oppose the use of torture on prisoners on the “war on terror” and that there’s therefore no need to see a film about it. But the more light shone on the political double-talk that led us into this moral dead-end, the better.

It starts with the seizing, imprisonment and homicide – that’s the word on the death certificate – of an Afghan taxi driver, Dilawar, at the US’ air base at Bagram.

From this single case the film fans out, calmly and clearly – no Michael Moore histrionics here – to look at how deaths, torture and abuse became part of the system of US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The film’s key point is that abusive interrogation methods were indeed “part of the system” rather than actions of a few “bad apples” (how absurdly inadequate is that phrase for describing the viciousness, cruelty and depravity of those responsible).

It’s true that, as is quoted in the film, “You always get people in the military who are just this side of the Marquis de Sade.” That’s why the military applies strict rules for what is permissible.

It’s also true that in Afghanistan and Iraq some ordinary soldiers didn’t question what was being done to prisoners: “It was us against them”, says one interviewee. “I didn’t want to go against my fellow soldiers.”

But what occurred in Bagram, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib was the result of a policy that came from the top. It came from the temporising of Department of Justice lawyers, from former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, from Vice President Dick Cheney (“We have to use any measures at our disposal”) from President Bush, who is quoted as saying that thousands of enemies had been arrested but “many others are no longer a problem” for the US and its allies.

“Day by day the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice,” he says.

Terrorists in Bagram, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and other jails are not alone in learning that US justice meant nothing. The lesson has also been learned by prisoners who were not terrorists: they probably account for a sizeable proportion of the 90 per cent of prisoners who were captured not by US forces “on the battlefield” but by militias and others turning in innocent people for bounty or for personal revenge. In Dilawar’s case, the 22-year-old taxi driver was delivered to the US military by real terrorists responsible for firing rockets at a military checkpoint, as a way of pinning the blame on others.

The justification for this catastrophic legacy of state-sanctioned brutality and Geneva Convention rule-breaking is that tough interrogation (the sanitised phrase for what The Man On The Clapham Omnibus would call torture) extracts life-saving information from terrorists. But as Professor Alfred McCoy says in his on-camera account of the US intelligence community’s development of interrogation techniques, “You will get information, but you will get false information.”

Information thus obtained includes the “evidence” that convinced then Secretary of States Colin Powell to support Bush’s Iraq invasion plans and which he presented to the United Nations.

“I think Powell will say it was the most embarrassing day of his life,” surmises McCoy.

This is all very bleak. But at least Alex Gibney has been able to make an Oscar-winning film about the subject and the Supreme Court has ruled that foreign terrorism suspects have the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts. And as I write, I am listening to a news report in which Senator Lindsey Graham, an Air Force Reserve colonel who teaches military law for the service, is saying that guidance on interrogation techniques provided by Administration lawyers "will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities."

Watch the film – and hope that it helps bring back the US from the dark side.

* Taxi to the Dark Side, 22 July, 6.30pm, free, Human Rights Action Centre, 17-25 New Inn Yard, EC2. Info: Amnesty