'Taxi to the Dark Side' Leaves Critic "Feeling As If I Needed to Vomit."

With former CIA chief George Tenet's appearance on 60 Minutes (which Portfolio's Matt Cooper comments on today) still fresh in my mind, I read Salon's review of Taxi to the Dark Side, a documentary about "the recent development of torture as U.S. policy" with special interest. It premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this past Saturday night. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir called the screening "explosive," quoting director Alex Gibney, who also made Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, as saying: "I hope it provokes some rage." Well, it apparently made O'Hehir so angry that he wanted to puke. Here's part of his review:

In the long haul, you hope that this movie's account of how the Bush-Cheney administration has eviscerated the Constitution, and abandoned basic tenets of human rights and human dignity, provokes some constructive rage. But right there on the sidewalk, my rage was not constructive. I wanted to get stinking drunk in some dead-end bar (not the actual ones available on 23rd Street, where the drinks come in funny colors and cost $14) and scream at strangers, tell them that if this country had any fucking stones we would drag these people out of Washington, strip them of their citizenship and their clothes, and drive them white-baby naked across the Rio Grande to fend for themselves in the Sonora desert.

It's not that there's any truly startling new information in "Taxi to the Dark Side." Gibney makes clear how much of his film rests on the reporting of Carlotta Gall and Tim Golden of the New York Times, among various others. If you've been reading the best investigative reporting on the subject since the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke, in fact, you've gotten the main points already: The abuse and beatings and torture and murder (yes, murder) of detainees in U.S. custody have not been the result of a few undisciplined "bad apples" in the military. Rather, they have resulted from a deliberately murky policy set at the Defense Department and in the White House, whose true goals are to claim far-reaching, extra-constitutional powers for the president; to establish that Muslim detainees from other countries have no inherent human rights or legal rights at all; and to condition the American people to the belief that torture will stop terrorism, and that to think otherwise is to be a pantywaist Osama lover.

According to Salon, the film is still seeking a distributor. If you want to hear directly from the Oscar-nominated Gibney about his doc, you can check out this Q&A with him from the Wall Street Journal online.

WSJ.COM: What impact do you think the film will have? Do you think the movie will be demoralizing for members of the military and their families?

MR. GIBNEY: I hope not to have an impact on morale. The military felt it had clear guidelines that were being fiddled with and undermined by civilian leadership. It's up to officers to instill guidelines and it's up to leadership to ensure guidelines are being followed.

WSJ.COM: During the film, I was reminded of the famous experiment by Phillip Zimbardo at Stanford University in the early '70s involving mock guards and prisoners.

MR. GIBNEY: It's funny that you mention that, because the Stanford experiment and the famous [Stanley] Milgram experiment came up recently when we were discussing the film. What the Milgram and Stanford University experiments found was that people in certain situations can do some awful things. Zimbardo actually served as an expert witness in the Abu Ghraib trial.These [soldiers investigated over Dilawar's death] are regular guys. Not bad apples. The administration has referred to the abuses at Abu Ghraib as the work of a few bad apples. But like the movie's title, most of us have a dark side, and we will go there under certain circumstances.

WSJ.COM: What did you learn during the making of this film? Did your goals change as the film evolved?

MR. GIBNEY: I was first consumed with the question of "why?" Expert literature says torture will always get people to talk, it's very effective that way. But by and large, what people say isn't reliable. So why use it? I kept asking that question to everyone I met. And they told me, "Well, it's political. You get exactly what you want to hear." Over time, it becomes a very useful thing: a means to hear what you want to hear, and also to get others to say what you want them to say.

A movie about the Bush-Cheney policy of torture that will make you shake with rage [Salon]