True/False Films

Taxi to the Dark Side

In person: director Alex Gibney.

On December 1, 2002, an Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar took three passengers for a ride. Nine days later he died in an interrogation cell at Bagram Air Force Base. The military coroner ruling: homicide. Was his murder the work of a few bad apples? What about 36 other military-declared prisoner homicides? From Bagram to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo and beyond, patterns of abuse have emerged. Where does the buck stop? Oscar nominee Alex Gibney, director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, asks New York Times journalists, military guards and government officials — and shows disturbing never-before-seen footage from inside the prisons. As Vice President Cheney told Meet the Press, "We also have to work through 'the dark side' to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective." (RM)