• War Movies

• Middle East Movies

From the director of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," Alex Gibney's "Taxi to the Dark Side" is an investigation into the reckless abuse of power by the Bush Administration. By probing the homicide of an innocent taxi driver at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, the film exposes a worldwide policy of detention and interrogation that condones torture and the abrogation of human rights. This disturbing and often brutal film is the incisvie examination to date of the Bush Administration's willingness, in its prosecution of the "war on terror," to undermine the essence of the rule of law. The film asks and answers a key question: what happens when a few men expand the wartime powers of the executive to undermine the very principles on which the U.S. was founded.

Incorporating rare and never-before-seen images from inside the Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons, and interviews with former government officials such as John Yoo, Alberto Mora and Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, interrogators, prison guards, New York Times reporters Tim Folden and Carlotta Fall (who wrote the first stories about the homicides in Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan) and the families of tortured prisoners, the films dissects the progrssion of the Administration's policy on torutre from the secret role of key administration figures, such as Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales and others to the soldiers in the field.

In the face of thousands of prisoners passing through the system, an astonishing number of admitted homidcides, and a hastily drated law - the Military Commissions Act - that grants immunity to government officials for crimes agianst humanity while denying the fundamental right of habeas corpus to others, "Taxi to the Dark Side" forces us to ask why, in the face of so much evidence of the ineffectiveness of cruelty as means of obtaining information, we sought to insist on its use? Have we, by pursuing such ruthless means, lost the moral high group in the war on terror and made ourselves less safe? Even more important, have we compromised our own sense of humanity, our democratic values and our effectiveness as a world leader?

Though torture was a big topic in the media, the media didn't show you in-depth interviews like these. The media painted the torture question as a philosophical one with the administration using vague words in describing what they were doing. There is nothing vague about this film. A lot of people know about Guantanamo but not many know whats going on in other lesser known jails. This is a well made film, made by the director of another great documentary, "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room."