Taxi to the Dark Side

After being dropped by the Discovery Channel for its "controversial" nature, Alex Gibney's Academy Award winning documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, aired last night for the first time on television on HBO. The film, which is essential viewing, includes interviews with soldiers stationed in Afghanistan and Iraq speaking earnestly about the interrogation techniques practiced in Abu Ghraib and Guanantamo Bay by the U.S. Military. I needn't tell you that the soldiers are familiar—alike most strikingly in that none of them have stars—all are young; one wears a Social Distortion t-shirt. What is surprising is how sympathetic they become when viewed in light of the compelling case made by the film that the use of torture was not introduced by "a few bad apples," but rather, disseminated from the highest levels of the United States government. Their stories recall the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, for which psychology professor Philip Zimbardo created a mock prison with college students playing either guards or prisoners. The experiment was supposed to last two weeks, but was abruptly halted after six days, when Zimbardo decided it had become "out of control."

Still, with its flashes of images from Holocaust camps, Taxi to the Dark Side is undeniably an indictment, and not only of the U.S. government. Auschwitz survivor Jean Amery wrote, "For the tortured, the torturer is solely the other… Sadism is to be understood not in the light of the sexual pathology but rather in that of existential psychology, in which it appears as the radical negation of the other, as the denial of the social principle as well as the reality principle."

Watch Taxi to the Dark Side for the footage of John McCain questioning a thoroughly uncomfortable Alberto Gonzales, and watch it to recall—as I did—that even as we near the final hours of the Bush presidency, the legacy that has been left by this administration is a danger that the U.S. will not be allowed simply to forget.