Alex Gibney Takes Us In A "Taxi to the Dark Side"

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Alex Gibney Takes Us In A "Taxi to the Dark Side"

(from brinkzine.com 1/10/08)

•   Alex Gibney, photo by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders
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Alex Gibney isn't as well known as the publicity-driven Michael Moore, but in the long run his political films may have more impact.  His documentaries, which are about, I'd say, powerful people with bad intentions, are sensible, focused and coherent, and, though they are from the left and are passionate and angry, unify viewers of all persuasions against the crimes we witness. We come away talking not about the filmmaker but the fascinating cast of characters that populate the screen.   Gibney has too many television and film credits to mention, but suffice it to say that he wrote and produced "The Trials of Henry Kissinger," was the senior producer for HBO's "Soldiers in the Army of God" (about the radical fringe of the anti-abortion movement), produced PBS's "Speak Truth to Power" (about human rights defenders), and wrote, directed and produced "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," of which he says, "It felt good to be nominated for an Oscar except for those fucking penguins."  Gibney recently was Executive producer on "No End in Sight," Charles Ferguson's brilliant film about the Bush administration's early, fatal blunders after the invasion of Iraq.  It's on the fifteen-film short list of possible Oscar nominees, and one of it's competitors for the five slots is Gibney's "Taxi to the Dark Side."  A prize-winner at last spring's Tribeca Film Festival, it opens Friday in New York and will be playing in a huge number of national theaters for a documentary—which is a great thing because it shouldn't be missed, if only to honor Dilawar, the poor, simple Afghan cab driver who was tortured to death by American soldiers in Bagram prison in an attempt to extract information about crimes he didn't commit.  The core story—Dilawar and the guards who beat him to death—is set in Afghanistan, but the haunting taxi ride Gibney takes us on goes through Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay to the White House and Congress, who are responsible for a run-amuck policy that includes the torturing of prisoners in the War on Terror. So much for American ideals and virtues. The movie's key theme says Gibney, is "the corruption of the human spirit."  On Tuesday, I participated in the following roundtable interview with Gibney about his important film.  I note my questions.

Question: Did your father's experiences as a Naval interrogator during WWII influence you to make this movie.
Alex Gibney: That was big.  He was the person who really pushed me to do it.  There were other people who came forward and said, "Look, we're angry about the subject.  If we raise the money, will you do it?"  I was thinking about it and it was a tough call.  But I was talking to him and he was very upset about the issue of the harsh torture being used in the war on terrorism and really encouraged me to make the movie.  It had been a very formative experience for him.  Back then, his eyesight was too bad so he couldn't go into the marines.  He was sent to the navy's language school and learned Japanese, and then he was sent out to the Pacific Theater to interrogate Japanese prisoners, first at Pearl Harbor and then in Okinawa.  So he was interrogating them much like the people at Abu Ghraib, right in the heat of one of the bloodiest battles of the war.  Looking back, it never occurred to him to even think about using some of the techniques that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were all blithely thinking about using this time.  There already had been reports of Japanese atrocities toward American and British prisoners, but he felt that as an American he represented a higher ideal.  I'm not suggesting that being an interrogator is all about being nice, but once you take them out of the war-time paradigm the prisoners are gone, so now instead of the interrogator and prisoner relating to each other as enemies they can relate to each other as human beings.  Out of that human relationship comes a certain trust and then the disclosure of information. Most skilled interrogators like my father and Jack Cloonan, the former FBI agent in the movie, feel they get that even when dealing with tough, ruthless prisoners. He was really pissed off when he discovered some of this stuff happening today.  So the film became very important to me.
Q: In your film, the prisoners who are interrogated, including Dilawar, the Afghan cab driver who was beaten to death while in custody in Bagram prison, are innocent of crimes.
AG: That becomes the big problem.  When you have a system where there are coercive interrogation techniques, it's most effective at getting false confessions.  Some people think it's a joke, but I went for my vacation over New Year's to Bangkok and Cambodia.  In Phnom Penh, I went to the Khmer Rouge Genocide Museum.  As I was passing through the museum it struck me that after I'd seen all the faces of the people who had been ruthlessly interrogated and confessed to horrible crimes before they were murdered, in noticed that there in the corner was a waterboard.  Waterboarding was the key method used by the Khmer Rouge to obtain false confessions.  Everybody is guilty when a waterboard is employed.  A lot of people who have been picked up in the War on Terror are innocent.  I'll tell you what I find astounding.  If you do a deep history of some of these interrogation techniques—temperature extremes, sensory deprivation, forced standing, sleep deprivation—you'll learn that some of the techniques were used by the Chinese against our soldiers in the Korean War to achieve some kind of brainwashing, so our soldiers would suddenly say, "I believe in the rectitude of the communist cause."  So it was those techniques that made their way into the CIA's KUBARK Interrogation Manual and the SERE schools—the Survival-Evasion-Resistance-Escape schools where we teach our soldiers to resist horrible people when they get captured overseas.  But all those techniques we use were designed not to get good intelligence but to get people to falsely confess for propaganda purposes.
Danny Peary: What were your feelings just sitting there and interviewing the guards who had killed Dilawar?
AG: Initially I had trepidation because I was kind of angry.  I'd read Tim Golden in the New York Times, and one of the things about the Dilawar case that made me want to do the movie was that it was a five-day interrogation although after day three the interrogators were pretty much convinced that he was innocent.  But they tortured him for another two days until he died.  So I looked at these guy and thought, "What kind of people are you?" But after spending a good bit of time with them and being somewhat nervous myself about talking to them I found myself having tremendous sympathy for them in a way that I didn’t initially suspect.  So much so that in one of the cuts of the film we went almost too far in portraying them sympathetically, so we put back some detail of the cruel things that they did so that it was clear that I wasn't saying they were victims, too.
DP: Is it your belief after spending time with them that if you put any bunch of soldiers to guard prisoners--and give them no instructions--they will act exactly as these guards did?  And does this administration believe this?
AG: I'm not sure what the higher-ups' intention was but we know they exerted tremendous pressure on the guards even while removing restrictions.  That should have told them something.  I think they knew to some extent what they were going to get from these men.  Philip Zimbardo did the Stanford prison experiment and the volunteers who became guards did act rudely and the volunteers who were prisoners became very defensive.  But I think people have the will to resist that stuff.
DP: But these were untrained guys. 
AG: Totally untrained kids who were put into a situation and told that the gloves were off and they could do what they needed to do to get results. They don't speak the language, they don't have any cultural training, they don't have any understanding about the difference between a Pashto and Farsi speaker.  And they're told to produce and are criticized if they seem too lenient.
Q: Did any of the soldiers you spoke to articulate about what they were fighting for?
AG:  Many were gung-ho after 9/11 and wanted to kick some ass.  Today a lot of them are deeply-scared people because they were asked to do things they don't feel so good about.  I talked to people who were disillusioned.  I'm sure there are some who aren't but most I talked to were.  Almost all of them felt let down by the civilian administration.  There were a lot of marines and other soldiers who felt they always were being misdirected by the civilian administration.
Q: Talk about the challenge of bringing together the many elements of your film.
AG: It was a real challenge.  It was very hard.  After making "Enron," I thought, "Not again!" I didn't know I'd come across another story that is so complex and intricate that it's going to give me nightmares every night trying to find a structure.  To some extent, that was one of the reasons I chose the Dilawar story. I chose that story for a number of reasons, but one of them was that I could follow the ripples of his murder out of Bagram, as his interrogators move on to Abu Ghraib and the passengers in his cab are sent to Guantanamo. The way they were sent to Guantanamo is the perfect example for how many people were sent there, we've now learned.  They weren't the worst of the worst.  They were people sent there for bounty or, in the case of Dilawar's passengers, to cover up the fact that we murdered an innocent man.  We sent them over and people are supposed to think they were all part of a cabal.  These peanut-farmers spent eighteen months in Guantanamo.  As we were weaving this structure and trying to keep the Dilawar story going, there were key aspects of the larger issues that had to be reckoned with, like the whole "ticking time bomb" scenario and the differences between Torture Lite and the brutal torture that was inflicted on Dilawar.  Even liberal-minded people I know get seduced by that ticking-time-bomb scenario in a way that I find appalling. All of these issues come up in the movie so it took a long, long time to get the structure right.  Finally, on a dramatic level, we didn't really get it right until the end.  We'd somehow done an update on the guards' stories far too early in the film and when viewers saw that they felt they were done with the movie.  So we took their stories and put them close to the end, to just before Bush effectively pardons himself.  That seemed to be kind of a resolution, where we could tie up all the threads and the emotional Dilawar story, where we return to his family, comes full circle. It was very hard to get that narrative right, but I think we got it. 
From the beginning I wanted to tell the Dilawar story and the story of the guards.  My editor, Sloane Klevin, and I had some conflict on this.  Early on, I went to Guantanamo.  That was an interesting trip. We filmed it in a different way than most crews who have been allowed to film down there.  I took it to be a dog and pony show so that's how we filmed it.  That was a lot of colorful and lively footage.  Meanwhile we had the testimony of only one or two of the Bagram guards. So our tension early on was about whether we'd keep the structure.  There was a huge Guantanamo section that we later broke up into two Guantamo sections, and made that work with the Dilawar narrative.  One decision proved valuable.  The film was mostly shot by two people: Greg Andracke and Maryse Alberti, who also shot "Enron."  We tried to figure out a visual scheme for this film, knowing that we'd shoot hither and yon and she wouldn't always be there.  I made the decision that all the Bagram people would be shot in the same way.  So we painted a backdrop that I carried with me everywhere, whether it was to Birmingham, England, Columbus, Ohio, Washington, D.C.  And every time we filmed someone who had been to Bagram we filmed him against that background and lit him in the same way. It gets complicated knowing who all the people are, but if you see them in front of that background, you know instantly they were in that prison.  Also it was a visual scheme that kind of represented the prison and gave it a visual coherence and structure that helps the film's narrative.
DP: You're a film noir fan, so did you borrow from that for those darkly lit prison scenes?
AG: Well, yeah, there's the light and dark, good and evil, but I didn't want to overplay it.  There's something about it being a dark prison and being lit straight down the middle that I thought was effective.
Q: How long did the editing take once you had the footage?
AG: The fact is, the shooting and editing happens simultaneously.  We didn't go out and collect and say we had enough now.  There was some sense of urgency with the story because it seemed so timely.  Nevertheless, the investors and my father, who died while I was making the film, kept saying "hurry up."  But as we were going, we were finding new material and getting new and interesting people to come forward to talk.  Then that footage would have to be integrated into the narrative.  It's the same thing that happened with "Enron."  The woman who was very close to Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling didn't agree to be interviewed until very late and we had to completely change the structure to accommodate her.  It always happens.  In this film, the trip to Afghanistan didn't happen till very late, partially for safety reasons.  The first time we were set to go, my cameraman chickened out because there were riots in Kabal and people were being killed.  Some of the photos of Bagram, which had never been seen publicly by anyone, came in very late in the game.  That suddenly gave us a visual representation of Bagram, which was so important.   I can't tell you where I got them, but we kept following different people and asking and finally somebody came forward and said, "Here they are."  We knew something was there because some of those photographs had surfaced.  But we hadn't gotten the autopsy photos of Dilawar or photos of the isolation cells or holding pens, the so-called air-locks.  Getting themt was big.  And from the same source, we got the videotape of the JAG officer confirming that these things were de facto policies.
Q: When did you know the film was done? 
AG: Oh, I don't know.  What do they say—Films don't get finished, they get abandoned. We were racing to finish it to get it released and it was too long,  too long, always too long.  I think once we moved the soldiers to the end, we thought that it felt right.  We did some final trimming and we were done.
Q: How much of the movie did your father see before he died?
AG: I don't think he saw any cuts of the film.  He only heard me talk to him about how the movie was going. 
Q: Why did you decide to put the footage of him expressing his opinion on the use of torture today in the final credits rather than in the film itself?
AG: It was a decision made when the structure was already in place.  Even so, I was a bit nervous about using the footage.  I loved it but I didn't want anybody to feel I was forcing this footage of someone who had recently died into the film.  I said I couldn't be objective about it, so I had my colleagues in the editing room look at it and tell me if it made sense and worked.  If I'd do it over again, perhaps I'd have structured it differently, but at that time it seemed right to give him the last word in the dedication, where he appears and actually speaks.
Q: You did a good job as narrator.  Was there any trepidation about doing it?
AG: I couldn't afford anybody else.  I only did it because my dad is in the film.  At that point it became personal, so I thought it would be okay.  It just made sense.  I wrote the narration slightly differently as a result.  My narration is pretty objective but when I changed it for my voice it allowed me to be a little bit angled.  There was a certain amount of nervousness, not only on my part but also on the part of my editor.  But she was happy enough with it.
Q: Is there anything you regretted leaving out of the film? 
AG: I wish I'd put more of the SERE school in, but at some point the film become unwieldy and I had to trim it.  At one point the film had a certain amount black humor in it.  At one point we learned that a hunger-strike at Guantanamo was being broken through the use of these mysterious restraint chairs that immobilized prisoners to they could force-feed them.  We learned that these chairs had been discovered by an enterprising person at Guantanamo who found a website called restraintchair.com, and there was a sheriff in Denison, Iowa who was manufacturing them to momentarily restrain people on crack until they could be calmed down.  So I went out to visit this sheriff and his lovely wife, Pam, who was dressed in a way that was color-coordinated with the chair and she sat in it and they demonstrated the chair.  It was in the film but parts had to be cut for the better good of the whole.  Losing the SERE school was harder because that's where the administration is getting some of its harsh interrogation techniques.  They were taking techniques used for defense by trainees and turning them into offense.
Q: Were there people you tried to interview but couldn't?
AG: John McCain was one. I tried very hard.  I wrote him several times. To some extent when you're dealing with the political establishment, being an independent documentarian is not very advantageous.  If you're from CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, or Fox, they'll give you the interview, no problem.  But if you're an independent that's trouble.  So for whatever reason, McCain ran away from us.  I hope some day he'll see the film.
DP: If someone, like me, says to you that the most frightening images in the film are of Congress giving Bush standing ovations when he says he'll treat prisoners harshly.
AG: I agree with you.  It happens twice and I think those are two most frightening images in the movie and I put them in for that purpose.  Because both times, both sides of the aisle rise as one.  The second time, when Bush says that one by one by one terrorists will learn the meaning of American justice, you even see John Kerry applauding a little.  Congress utterly abdicated its responsibility.  If you go back to Cheney's minority report on Iran-Contra, he says he always believed strongly in executive power.  He made no secret about it.  We have all the power, therefore we now have the opportunity to exert our values on the world.
DP: Talk about our new attorney general Michael MuKasey and his new independent investigation about the destruction of CIA video tapes that recorded the torture of prisoners.
AG: I don't know what to think.  He could have appointed a special prosecutor, but he didn't do it.  So it's too early to tell.  The jury is really out on MuKasey.  Speaking about Congress, I’m so disappointed in two Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein and Charlie Schumer, for just rolling over and allowing for his confirmation.  When a guy won't say that waterboarding is illegal it's shocking.
Q: What do you think will happen in the future in regard to America and the use of torture in the war on terror?
AG: My view is that we can't go forward unless we reckon with the past.  In other words, we need to hold some people to account or we can't really go forward and hold our heads high.  Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, John Yoo, David Addington, and others.  I'm not saying they're guilty, but let's have a prosecutor look at it and decide.  In some shape and store, we have to roll back some of the crazy laws we have enacted, but we need to deal with the past before moving on.  That's the one thing that scares me a little about Barack Obama.  While I really applaud his ideas on inclusion and that he's willing to be critical but at the same time unify everybody, you also don't want to sweep crimes under the rug because they have a peculiar way of coming back to haunt you.
DP: You said that you don't say they're guilty, but doesn't your film say they are?
AG: I mean guilty in a legal sense.  I'm not a judge and jury.  But I can try them in the court of public opinion and as far as I'm concerned they're guilty.
DP: Back in the Nixon days your phone would be tapped and you'd be in some secret government file.
AG: I’m sure my phone is tapped.  I'm not kidding.  George McGovern called for the impeachment of Bush and Chaney and said, "Next to these guys, Nixon was nothing."


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