Guest Post: Reflections on Taxi to the Dark Side

Taxi to the Dark Side, an award-winning documentary about the murder of an innocent Afghani in U.S. detention, has been released on DVD. Jared Feldman, Senior Policy Associate at the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, wrote the following moving piece after the film's initial release. It was originally posted on the JCPA blog. The NRCAT Action Fund has developed a discussion guide with information about candidate voting records, which is available from their website.

Last week, I saw the Oscar award winning film, Taxi to the Dark Side. It was chilling. The film traces the story of Diliwar, an Afghan taxi driver who was accused of aiding militants rocketing U.S. bases. Dilawar was captured by an Afghan militia and turned over to U.S. forces where he was held at Bagram Air Base. After several interrogations, that included techniques such as kneeing the detainee in the thigh, Diliwar was found dead in his cell. The military medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.

This is just one example of brutal treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Taxi to the Dark Side continues by discussing the connection between the treatment of prisoners in Bagram, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

When I first decided to watch this film, I knew the subject matter would be difficult. I have seen several documentaries on this subject. I have worked extensively on this issue, advocating for an explicit legislative prohibition of this type of treatment. I already knew about many of these stories and the accusations of cruelty at the hands of U.S. personnel. However, I wasn't prepared for the full force of this picture.

The entire practice of torture is absolutely reprehensible. Not only does this violate our ethics, compromise our morals, and undermine our national standing in the world, it is an anathema to democracy and a free society. Our government seems prepared to head down that road, or at least protect the option of heading down that road, for methods that do not even work. Seasoned interrogators and investigators have reported that intelligence gained through cruelty and torture is unreliable.

While watching Taxi to the Dark Side, I found one scene particularly disturbing. Afghan detainees are being processed by U.S. troops as they enter U.S. custody. The detainees stand in a line; their sleeves, rolled up. A U.S. solider, with Sharpie indelible marker in hand, begins to write the prisoner's ID number on his right inner forearm. (The picture to the right is taken from the film.) Even writing this post I am having a horrible visceral reaction to this image. Marking prisoners in this way harkens back directly to the number tattoos that mark Holocaust victims. The symbolism is disgusting. The United States military was marking its prisoners in a way similar to that of the Nazis. This policy needed to start somewhere. It seems unlikely to me that this was a one-time occurrence or the idea of a random young solider assigned to a Military Police unit. An expectation of brutality is seeded in this policy.

In the seminal Prison Experiment, lead by Stanford social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, we learned about the power of context and how easy it is to manipulate ordinary people to do extraordinarily heinous acts. In this experiment, Dr. Zimbardo and his colleagues transformed the basement of the psychology building at Stanford University into a mock prison. Some participants were assigned to be prisoners and others prison guards. Palo Alto Police arrested the "prisoners" and brought them to the "jail". The experiment continued as abusive "guards" quelled a rebellion, imposed solitary confinement on the prisoners, forced the prisoners to be naked and wear bags on their heads. Over the course a few days, the prisoners and guards (college students from Palo Alto, California) began to slip into their roles. The prisoners introduced themselves by their numbers, and the guards were intent on preventing prison outbreaks and rebellions. Several prisoners suffered emotional distress and were released early. The experiment was abruptly halted as the brutality continued.

Many experts, including Dr. Zimbardo, have drawn the connection between the Stanford Prison Experiment and the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib. However, it is often hard to determine the specific procedures or expectations that lead to a culture of permissiveness and brutality. I was deeply disturbed as I watched several of these procedures, such as the marking of the detainees, unfold in Taxi to the Dark Side.

Great legal scholars have argued that there are certain practices that are fundamentally inconsistent with democracy. For example, a democracy cannot exist without some form of independent arbiter to evaluate imprisonment by the executive (habeas corpus in our system). This argument has been extended to torture. Can a government that uses torture be a true democracy? Does that level of coercion fundamentally compromise the integrity of the justice system and undermine the basic elements of the rule of law, rending the democratic process impotent? History teaches us that some of the most brutal regimes are also some of the most autocratic. The United States is, should be, and must be the leading democratic nation in the world. Our moral fortitude, ethical foundation, and pluralistic fabric can only be sustained and expressed by an enlightened democratic government. By establishing policies that so closely resemble those of the most heinous of regimes, our nation is harmed and weakened. Nowhere is this clearer than in Taxi to the Dark Side and the policies that lead to the abuses at Bagram Airbase, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.