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HBO: A lot has been written about the prisoner
abuse scandal since the story broke in 2004.
What inspired you to explore the subject?
Alex Gibney: Part of the inspiration was my father, who had
been a Navy intelligence officer in World War
II. He felt like the very values he had fought
for in World War II were being transgressed,
and felt particularly upset because he himself
had been an interrogator. So I had a personal
way into this story, but I also felt that it was
just deeply shocking that our administration
might be embarked on a policy of torture, or
that this might be not an aberration, not a few
bad apples, but a rotten barrel. And so that
made me want to get into it.
HBO: To what degree did your own personal feelings color the direction of the film?
Alex Gibney: I think it's only honest that every writer, even
in the most so-called objective news context,
always puts their own point of view in it, to a
lesser or greater extent. I think the style of the
film tries to reckon with all the
counterarguments. But I think that as a
truth-seeker and an investigator, I ultimately
have to come to conclusions. And the story
lays out those conclusions, not in ways that
show me at a blackboard gesticulating point-
by-point, but by letting people tell the story,
and also letting the evidence tell the story.
HBO: There's a quote in the film from a soldier
which serves as a metaphor for the entire film.
He says, "Put people in crazy situations and
people do crazy things."
Alex Gibney: That's right. And I think that the beating
heart of the film is the testimony of the
soldiers, who are on the ground trying to carry
out these policies, which I think were
sometimes purposely vague, even as they were
accompanied by tremendous pressure. And I
think that the testimony of these soldiers
directly refutes the notion of "a few bad
apples," which was proffered by the
administration.
In the wake of the photographs of Abu Ghraib,
it was as if they were just a few bad guys. In
fact, what you see is a very bad policy that,
perhaps, was purposefully reckless. Or even
giving them the benefit of the doubt, it was
certainly reckless. And it was certainly
ignorant because it was accompanied by
tremendous pressure to get actionable
intelligence, and because the administration
tried to remove all of the certainty of prior
agreements, like the Geneva Accords.
All these things, I think, came down on these
soldiers in ways that left them perplexed. And
there's a natural tendency in war, and in
wartime situations, when your buddies are
being killed, to want to get revenge on the
enemy, even if that person may be innocent.
And to, in an interrogation, undergo what the
military calls "force drift," where, if you don't
get the information right away, you keep
pushing further and further and further, until
you end up doing horrible things. And soon
those things end up being a kind of de facto
policy. It's often never written down, but we
know from going from base to base, whether it
was Bagram in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in
Iraq, or Guantanamo in Cuba, that it was
spinning out of control. It was as if the
administration had introduced a virus, a very
virulent, mutating, migrating virus that
spread throughout the entire system. And
over time, it got completely out of hand.
HBO: It's chilling to hear Tim Russert's interview
with Dick Cheney where he talks about
intelligence gathering in a post-9/11 world,
how the U.S. will "have to work the dark side."
Your title uses that as a metaphor to tell a
larger story.
Alex Gibney: I think the film is really about the corruption
of the American character. And "Taxi to the
Dark Side," obviously, has a number of
different meanings. There is a taxi driver,
Dilawar, who was murdered in detention. The
taxi driver is the universal symbol; it's almost
like universal man. So there's a kind of
poignancy to that. He's a very particular
person, but he's a more generalized person.
Somebody who happens to be in the wrong
place at the wrong time, and just gets picked
up and then murdered, even though he is
perfectly innocent.
But the "Taxi to the Dark Side" also refers to
something else. And we reference it toward the
end of the film, and you see a kind of
mysterious taxi moving through the
monuments of Washington at night, because
it's very easy to lose your bearings in a
democracy. It's as easy as taking a taxi ride
from one end of town to another.
You can take a taxi ride to the dark side very
simply, with a few people in the Office of Legal
Counsel in the Department of Justice
tinkering with old rules in order to be able to
give the executive branch tremendous power.
As if the President was now a king who could
do whatever he wanted, and, indeed, could
break whatever law he wanted.
What you're talking about is undermining the
fundamental rule of law. That's 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. Because when
you have people in an administration who feel
that they have untrammeled powers, and they
have an interrogation technique which does
nothing more than get information that they
want to hear, then you're in George Orwell
1984 territory. And that's the terrifying thing
about the film. That's the taxi to the dark
side.
What I intended with this film was to provoke
a certain amount of righteous anger, and
patriotic anger. I felt the very principles of our
country had been upended and abused by a
rather cynical administration for its own
political gain, and in a way that showed both
their ignorance and their arrogance. It's up to
us as citizens, though, to do something about
it. Not just by voting, but by registering our
voices so that they can be heard, because it's
only with that outrage that the weak men and
women in Congress will be motivated to do
anything so that we can hold those
responsible to account.
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