Customer Rating: 
Summary: One fare you don't want to pay
Comment: Even though I heard it was great and it won the "Best Documentary" Oscar, I put off viewing TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE. I'm not sure why I procrastinated, but seeing I am only the fifteenth person to review it here, perhaps others are dragging their feet, too. Even my public library already demoted the TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE D.V.D. to its no-charge borrow section while older titles - many of them garbage - are still in the rental area.
But seconds into TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE, its compelling story of the Bush administration rejection of the Geneva Convention drew my attention like a soldier pointing a gun at you as you approach a checkpoint. While it centers on the murder of an Afghan taxi driver by American troops at a Bagram, Afghanistan military base, TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE covers the fares innocent people have paid at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and secret prisons in the so-called war on terror.
The poor use terrorism to wage war. The wealthy use war to terrorize. What a war on terror is supposed to be, I don't know, but as TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE documents, neither does George W. Bush. Just as Bush's approaches to invading Iraq and responding to Hurricane Katrina demonstrated no organization, TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE shows the same non-oversight of prisoner interrogation in the U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Director Alex Gibney, in an interview on DEMOCRACY NOW!, said American soldiers who tortured prisoners to death "had no training, and they were forced to do things that ultimately they're deeply haunted by. It's not something that they ever signed up for. And so, you see how that process worked. As one person says in the film, they were engulfed in what was called a fog of ambiguity, tremendous pressure to get intelligence but almost no training and no guidelines."
TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE reports that none other than the United States military declared no fewer than 37 of these deaths of suspects to be homicides. One is too many.
See TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Incredibly important film
Comment: Taking as its example an innocent taxi driver who was arrested, tortured and murdered at Bagram Prison pursuant to a widespread and unreliable method of detaining suspects by offering financial incentives to local warlords, this careful and thorough documentary clearly connects the dots to explain how America has stripped 83,000 detainees of their freedom and human rights in the name of protecting the same freedom and rights of Americans. The film makes an extremely cogent argument that the Cheney/Bush Administration philosophy of torture is unjustified under both moral or pragmatic grounds, and that the legacy of abuses committed at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay Prisons is not only immoral but counter-productive. Equally outrageous is that the lower level military personnel who perpetrated these frimes were court-martialed, while the top government officials (including most notably Cheney and Rumsfeld) who instituted and defended these tactics were never held accountable. If the vast resources America has spent detaining and torturing prisoners had instead been spent improving the conditions for war-stricken Muslim villages, we might have actually made some progress in the ill-conceived "war on terror".
Customer Rating: 
Summary: First-rate documentary filmmaking
Comment: A damning and impassioned examination of use of torture by the United States on suspected terrorists after the September 11th attacks, stretching from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Iraq.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Do They Really Want It Hidden?
Comment: Yes, the torture depicted in this film is an embarrassment and a possible war crime. Yes, the Administration under whose auspices it occurred seems to relish secrecy above all else. And yet, one has to wonder if perhaps there was a reason to let it be revealed which overrode all the reasons for keeping it hidden. Namely, to de-sensitize the American public to the very idea of torture. The fact that as much as 40% of the American people "approve" of torture is not a statistic to be taken lightly. And now the people have seen it in action, not merely read about it in news reports. The simple truth is, torture will be easier, not harder, to get away with the next time around - because the precedent has been set and now people are beginning to get used to the idea of it. Each of the former soldiers interviewed (many of whom are or have been on trial) expressed great remorse; but at the time they were executing the torture, their focus was only on doing their duty, not questioning it. The most telling (and most chilling) piece of these soldiers' story was that they each took a turn at kicking Dilwar's legs because they didn't know that someone else already had - it wasn't a case of them all standing around kicking him again and again but of each kicking him as part of his own independent interrogation regime. So, if these soldiers are to be believed, it was a lack of communication more than anything else that killed Dilwar. Apparently, it wasn't important to coordinate the soldiers' efforts to extract information - which makes you wonder if information was ever the goal of the "interrogation." So, ironically, it's more the gross incompetence and inefficiency of torture than the sheer brutality of it that may convince people to outlaw it once and for all.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Required Viewing for Every American
Comment: Quite simply the most important documentary made in recent years.
Here is the true shame of the Bush administration -- the complete disregard for the Geneva Conventions in the prosecution of the "war on terror".
Most shocking of all is the revelation that one of the key pieces of "intelligence" on which Colin Powell based his rationale for the Iraq War was false, the claim of a prisoner tortured into confessing what his captors wanted to hear.
Powell states that the day he pitched the war at the United Nations, relying on this grossly deficient intelligence, was one of the most "embarrassing" of his life.
Embarrassing? More appropriate words might be "tragic", "disastrous", or "unconscionable".
Worse, the Bush administration policy of employing torture, kangaroo courts, and the suspension of habeus corpus -- in defiance of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions -- came right from the top.
Here is Cheney snarling that these methods were necessary in the war on terror. Here is Bush trying to sell the need for "harsh" interrogation techniques as late as 2006. Here are presidential counsel John Yoo and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales trying to redefine "torture" as an acceptable component in prosecuting a war.
The whole lot of them should be made to experience 40 hours of sleep deprivation, or forced standing, or waterboarding -- to see for themselves why these forms of coercion bring us down to the level of any terrorists walking the planet.
FOR SHAME! FOR SHAME!
Let us hope that Barack Obama can help lead us back from this precipice of damnation to the brighter path Americans have chosen in previous generations.
The DVD also includes special features not included in the theatrical release of the film. Most notable of these is an interview with former President Jimmy Carter, who calls the Bush torture policies a disgrace as well as a sharp break with traditional American values.
The director's father also makes an appearance. He was an intelligence officer during WWII and the Korean War, and he rightly compares the Bush thugs to Hitler's goons back in Nazi Germany.
"Taxi to the Dark Side" is a film EVERY American needs to see, whatever your political leaning.
(P.S. another reviewer here has claimed this film condones torture. Huh? Was this person paying an iota of attention? "Taxi" condemns torture in no uncertain terms, you may be sure...)
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