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TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE offers an in-depth look at the torture practices of the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, focusing on an innocent taxi driver in Afghanistan who was tortured and killed in 2002.
Director: Alex Gibney
Share this film. Give others the chance to learn from its story.
Read The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison by Andy Worthington, which tells the story of each individual kept at this famed detention center.
Join Close Guantanamo, to help “end 12 years of injustice.”
Join TASSC, Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition. “TASSC International is the only organization in the United States founded by and for survivors of torture.”
Enroll in Amnesty International’s Stop Torture campaign
The Boston Globe’s Wesley Morris is thoroughly impressed by the comprehensive research that went into making a film about the war on terror. He says the film raises two questions. “One of them is the value of human rights. … The other is how effective torture – however it’s defined – even is.”
Learn more at The Boston Globe.
“One of the things I discovered is that torture turns out to be a lot more complicated than you originally think, because it’s not just the abuse of an interrogation technique, it ultimately leads down the road of the total corruption of the rule of law.”
Visit HBO for the full interview.
“TAXI is about the corruption of the American character, but every nation has the capacity to go there,” said filmmaker Alex Gibney in The Telegraph.
Accepting the Oscar, Gibney dedicated the award to Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and to his own father, a navy interrogator who urged Gibney to make the film due to his fury about what was being done to the rule of law.
Sidney Blumenthal, executive producer on TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE and former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton published an open letter inviting Karen Hughes to a private preview of the film.
“The CIA’s claim ‘is BS,’ said a former U.S. official familiar with evidence underpinning the report. “They are trying to minimize the damage. They are trying to say it was a very targeted program, but that’s not the case.”
Learn more about the program that launched under the Bush administration following 9/11, kept in place until 2006.
The 6,600-page, $40m Senate report investigating the role of torture during the War on Terror’s interrogations is still secret, but a summary of its 20 conclusions and findings alluded to the role of James Mitchell.
Breaking a 7-year-silence, Mitchell finally uses his voice to explain and defend himself.
Learn more in The Guardian.
Here are the top approved methods of interrogation taught by the U.S. Military’s training program called SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), which can destroy a person on many levels, physically, mentally and emotionally.
The use of these techniques is highly controversial. Many say they are essentially methods of torture and illegal under the Geneva Convention.
