Taxi to the Dark Side, a recent Oscar nominee for Best Documentary Feature, is the best non-fiction film produced to date about our government’s blurring of the already thin line between interrogation and torture. Alex Gibney, the filmmaker who brought us Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, delves once again into the darkest reaches of human nature. And as in that film, he again sets his story against a backdrop pulled directly from the year’s biggest headlines - in this case, the U.S. Military’s treatment of its wartime prisoners captured in the Middle East. Gibney's documentary tells the story of Dilawar, an Afghani taxi driver who was taken into custody by U.S. forces in late 2002 when he was found chauffeuring three men suspected in a terrorist attack on a nearby American base. It was learned much later that he was entirely innocent and oblivious to the identities of his passengers. Yet without any trial whatsoever, he was taken immediately to the U.S. prison in Bagram, a facility converted from an old Soviet air base and established mainly for the purposes of interrogating members of the Taliban. Tragically, Dilawar died after spending just five days there. Taxi to the Dark Side tells both Dilawar's story and the impact it had on the people around him along with the government who may have played a part in his demise.

Further investigation revealed that Dilawar had expired from "arterial complications caused by blunt force trauma to the legs" - in short, he had been beaten to death. When interviewed for the film, the soldiers in charge of this P.U.C. ("Person Under Control"), reveal that he was "broken down," like all prisoners there, by being forced to spend twenty of every twenty-four hours deprived of sleep, in a standing position, arms chained to the ceiling above him. They had been instructed to strike prisoners on the sides of their legs as a form of controlling them. And of all the men incarcerated there, Dilawar was remembered as being especially noisy, crying and screaming most of his waking hours (perhaps because he wasn’t at all guilty?). How a placation technique common in the U.S. military managed to evolve into cold-blooded murder is the question still lingering from this story. It’s also the platform from which Gibney launches his demand for answers to larger questions about the interrogation practices of our military and government in general, such as: "What’s effective?", "What’s acceptable?" and "Who’s responsible?"

As of the film’s completion, there had been a total of 105 prisoner deaths reported in this war, 25 of which were labeled "homicides." The film’s most powerful moments come when the soldiers implicated in Dilawar’s death (who later served time for the crime themselves) assert that time and time again, while stationed at Bagram, they tried unsuccessfully to get further clarification from their superiors as to how far they were allowed to go when interrogating. One soldier goes on to state he’s convinced that his commanding officers, as well as the U.S. Department of Defense, intentionally ignored their requests, so as to absolve themselves from any potential guilt in the future. Through these interviews, combined with chilling photos and footage of captives, Taxi to the Dark Side will most likely succeed in outraging each and every sensitive soul who sees it.

Purely on a level of craft, I did have a few small quarrels with Gibney’s filmmaking. The pacing of the movie is a bit awkward in that some of its most dramatic moments happen too early along its course. It also stumbles a bit late in the film when it widens its scope to include too many characters, attempting to trace the blame for these horrors up, down and every which way throughout the chain of command. As a result, the film does lose some focus during its final act, just when the messages it offers should probably be hitting home hardest. Although to be fair, when covering complicated issues with such far-reaching ramifications as these, those shortcomings are not only understandable, but easily overlooked. While it could be argued that Taxi to the Dark Side occasionally tries to tackle too many aspects of this provocative situation, it’s nonetheless a film that should not be missed by anyone hoping to hold an informed understanding of our involvement in this war.