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d. Alex Gibney; pr. Alex Gibney, Eva Orner, Suzannah Shipman; scr. Alex Gibney; ph. Maryse Alberti, Greg Andracke; m. Ivor Guest; ed. Sloane Klevin; cast. Alex Gibney (narration)

An Iraqi taxi driver is taken for interrogation as a suspect by the American military. He dies in custody several days later, an autopsy revealing his death the result of injuries sustained by torture.

Investigation of this incident leads to a chain of ultimate responsibility for war crimes during the War on Terror that implicates the key Republicans of the Bush era: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Significantly, the film ends with the acknowledgement that Bush has legislated so that the US is exempt from answerability to the international court for war crimes commited under its (Republican) authority.

The human rights and ethics of detainees and interrogation of terror suspects is the subject of this documentary, which outlines the practice and ideology of torture as Bush government policy during the War on Terror.

It is not alone in that concern and its eventual consideration of the legitimacy of water-boarding being the true legacy of the Bush era find an echo in the graphic dramatization of detainee detention in Rendition and Civic Duty, two key revisionist terrorist films also from 2007. These are themes interjected into the terrorist film post 9-11 and Taxi to the Dark Side is a potent documentary exploring the ultimate responsibility for the treatment of detainees by the US government and unravelling a chain of connections in the Bush era agenda of torture from the death of a helpless innocent in Afghanistan to torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

In that the Bush government here is responsible for the sad state of inhumanity and circumvention of the US Constitution that is revealed in this film, it is the Republican War on Terror that Taxi to the Dark Side exposes and indicts with harrowing implications concerning America’s international reputation, fictionalized in Rendition. The rhetoric of democracy is held in contrast to the horrendous moral indifference and inhumanity of US military authority and even of US foreign policy as typified by the issue of detainee treatment. Presidential authority in the name of US security after 9-11 is the issue here: morality in the War on Terror years, as exemplified by the issue of culpability for Abu Ghraib and the need to justify an era of systematized torture sanctioned at the highest levels of government.

The Republican-led War on Terror has brought to Americans a need to rationalize, justify and account for (excuse?) the systematic torture of detainees sanctioned by the US intelligence community:

hence the sidestepping of Constitutional practice by the CIA in detaining and interrogating terror suspects at secret torture bases outside the USA revealed at the end of Taxi to the Dark Side became the basis for the feature Rendition released the same year, also questioning culpability for the ethics of torture. These ethics of torture are synonymous with American military authority and even American democracy in the War on Terror. Indeed, underlying this documentary is a subtext concerning the compromises the Bush government has made to US ideals and its Constitution in the name of winning the War on Terror.

Taxi to the Dark Side is a revelation of how irredeemably hideous are American military ethics in the War on Terror as sanctioned by Republicans George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and especially Dick Cheney. Prior to 9-11 the US intelligence community treated terrorists as criminals (and as this book has shown, so did the movies) but 9-11 re-framed the discussion to one of the rules of wartime engagement when Dept of Justice Legal Council John Yoo and Special Presidential Counsel Alberto Gonzalez participated in the drafting of memos to Cheney arguing that in the War on Terror, the Geneva Conventions did not apply to terrorist detainees: America could circumvent international human rights. The principle of Command Responsibility under International Law ultimately holds the Republican leadership accountable for what are arguably the war crimes of the Bush era.

Taxi to the Dark Side reveals the horrifying inhumanity behind the staunch rhetoric of the Bush era, which this film equates with the legitimization of torture in a betrayal of the ideals that made America great.

Just how morally bankrupt American government became under the Republican leadership of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld (who have neatly exempted themselves from ever being prosecuted as war criminals, which this film implies is their due and deserved fate in history). Taxi to the Dark Side documents what it is about American power that has alienated the rest of the world and remains a powerful expose of the terrible inhumanity of the War on Terror, from the supposed “good guys” in Bush’s our side or theirs equation.

Taxi to the Dark Side is a film about what can be described as “Republican terrorism”: the ethics of torture.

Directed by Alex Gibney, maker of Enron: the Smartest People in the Room, Taxi to the Dark Side is a journalistic indictment of the Bush era in contrast to the blurring of subjectivity and objectivity in the work of Michael Moore in Fahrenheit 9-11. With this film, Gibney proves himself the documentarian truly able to hold the Bush government up for what they were, and insist they be accountable for their actions in the War on Terror.