Winner of the 2008 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, ‘Taxi to the dark side’ portrays a disturbing; in depth look of highly questionable interrogation practices used by US military guards on prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq & Guantanamo Bay in the aftermath of 9/11.Produced, Directed, Written & Narrated by Alex Gibney, the film begins with the tale of young innocent Dilawar who was working as a taxi driver in Afghanistan. After the Special Forces suspected him as Taliban in Bagram, he was interrogated by US soldiers in the most inhuman ways & died within next 5 days. The movie raised a pertinent question of military torture on innocent civilians who have nothing to do with Al Qaeda sponsor global terrorism. With shocking photos, footage, expert commentary & interviews with several soldiers stationed at prisons in Afghanistan & Iraq the documentary also shows that how certain bad apples of US military clearly violated the humanitarian rules outlined in Geneva conventions & treated these prisoners in the most savage ways using severe & cruel inhuman techniques such as sodomising, stripping humiliation, sleep deprivation, electrocute the testicles, ceiling handcuffing & many other atrocities in Bagram, Abu Ghraib prisons. It also shows clearly that how President Bush along with Rumsfeld & Cheney gave unwritten orders to use any means necessary. It’s hard to get evidences against the held detainees & so US forces used harsher & harsher techniques of torture to get their false confession to report their units & made their head held high in front of military. Some of them got medals for it also. It’s sad to know about the utter insanity made by US & allied arm forces backed up by US Government besides the reported fact that only 7 percentages of held detainees were found really guilty. What about their fundamental legal rights of liberty for these other 93 percent held innocent detainees who also became scapegoats & tortured incessantly in the cells.
As on September, 2006 the number of detainees reached 83,000 & out of them less than one percent are found guilty.
Watching this documentary raised certain pertinent questions like-
# Do we call it the loss of American ideals & standards in pursuit of national security? (It occurred in Vietnam & Iraq in the past & still they are pursuing the same blunder.)
# How long does the common civilians has to pay the price for living in the country where Al Qaeda & Taliban are operating?
# How valid is it to interrogate these prisoners debunking all legality & Geneva Convention & torture them in such a way that leads to organ failure or the death in certain cases?
# What about the dignity & morality of human life for an innocent person held as a suspected terrorist without any confirmation?
# How to remove this dark side from the minds of chaos stricken military?
“Torturing people is not the best way to get information. Breaking down the barriers between you & them, getting their confidence is the best way to get it”, admitted retired Judge Advocate General John Hutson. And that’s where I like to corroborate.
Ratings- 9/10
1 comment:
A great review, indeed. The US which consider itself to be a global policemen and a protector of human rights all over the world, is the most serious violater or human rights and dignity around the world. If one looks at the current problems that the world is facing today, most of them are gifts from the US. For example, Nuclear bombing of Japan, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the cold war with the USSR which lead the world on the brink of the third world war. One should also not forget that Al-Quaeda, Bin Laden, and Taliban were created and supported by the US to ward-off the russians in Afghanistan. And now it is facing its own frakenstein. The irony is that when two mammoths fights, the price is paid by the smaller living beings around.
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