Fits the leftist agenda.Hollywood is leftist, that's why movies and TV shows are often leftist.

This was a great and troubling movie about the U.S. military's use of torture. You will not easily forget scenes and details from this movie, especially because at the heart, it is the story of an innocent man murdered by Americans who think they are protecting our nation. It left me uneasy and with questions that I am still thinking about, years after seeing the movie. Where was the oversight from elected officials? How will we ever end the war on terror?Alex Gibney is a talented filmmaker and this is among his better films. I would strongly recommend that you see it. I also hope that if Alex is reading IMDb, he decides to make another movie about how the War on Terror has continued under a different president.

Because this is a documentary, I have to go about writing this review differently. First I will write about how it's constructed and the information it provides, then I will write my own personal response to the film.Alex Gibney's "Taxi to the Dark Side" is a tell-all about how the U.S. government's position on torture really operates. There is no doubt that this is a controversial subject, but it is essential viewing.Credit has to go to Gibney for not trying to make an attack on the Bush Administration and its practices. Unlike Michael Moore, he lets the information speak for itself. If there is something that deflects blame from someone that we previously thought should be held accountable, he still uses it. On the flip side, he lets no one who is guilty of something get away with it.The information comes fast and furiously, but it is clearly illustrated. Voiceovers, images, and interviews are used to great effect. "Taxi to the Dark Side" is a tad long, but Gibney has a lot to say.Now for my thoughts..."You put people in a crazy situation and people do crazy things."--one of the former interrogators interviewed.Indeed, the times we live in are "crazy," especially for the armed forces fighting overseas. It seemed that after 9/11 everything changed. The terrorist attacks on that day shocked the world, and the American people wanted justice. As an American, I can't blame them.But the question I ask is, at what cost do we want justice? If we don't uphold the values that we are governed by, then what are we protecting? What's the point of fighting if we can't live the way we want to, and the way that millions have given their lives for us to be able to live like in the past? After viewing the film, it seems to me that this stemmed from us wanting quick justice even though it couldn't be obtained. The pressure to do so caused us to act irrationally, and this is the result. Everyone knows that torture doesn't work, as victims are more likely to say what their abusers want to hear than that we simply don't know. But we bypass all the laws to get answers to prove that we're doing something.Yet this answer seems like incomplete reasoning. If this is the case, than why would John Yoo, who authored memos that exploited loopholes to give Bush and his cabinet expansive powers on this issue, and to give us leverage to disregard the Geneva Convention, which is supposed to protect people from these kinds of interrogation. Just because they may not be protected by the Geneva Convention, does that mean that we can torture them? Do they not have the same rights as someone who is? While we can blame people like Lyndie England, who committed the torture, Gibney says while their actions were reprehensible, and they did take their actions too far (and I think they should have been punished), he also portrays them as scapegoats. The soldiers had no real training, and were given vague, at best, guidelines at how to interrogate them.Furthermore, Gibney proves how important our right to a trial is. A shocking number of terrorists are kept in detention and tortured because they were handed over to the US by the Pakistanis and Iraqi army. But they were put in detention without a trial, and most with no evidence (and sometimes they were given a huge bounty in exchange). So how can we really know that these people are actually insurgents? Some are, but how many? Even if you're liberal or a conservative, this is a must see.

Anybody see "Cool Hand Luke" (1967) with Paul Newman as an inmate at a small southern prison camp? That's the one in which a guard tells Luke, "You got to get your mind right." A gripping movie, comic and then tragic. The guards, led by the pock-faced "man with no eyes", are real mean mothers. For infractions of the rules or any sassy backtalk, they lock Luke up in "the box", an upright wooden shelter the size of a one-hole outhouse, with only a pail for company. He's held there in the blistering heat for 24 hours. When Luke gets more uppity they simply beat hell out of him.Well, all of that is peanuts compared to what went on in our detainee camps at Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Gitmo -- not to mention the CIA-maintained black holes in countries known around the world for their humane treatment of prisoners, such as Egypt and Bulgaria.The detainees at Bagram and Abu Ghraib -- only 10 percent of whom were picked up by coalition forces, the rest being turned over to us by Afghanis or Pakinstanis, sometimes for bounty -- were not subject to any questioning before being thrown into solitary confinement and held there not for 24 hours, like Luke, but for weeks. They were shackled to the ceiling, forced to assume stress positions, beaten on the legs, waterboarded and forced to undergo many of the other horrors we associate with the Inquisition.But that's an old story by now. This film doesn't really tell us much that we hadn't known or guessed, except that it was worse than we imagined. It begins and ends with the case of Dilawar, a taxi driver who left his family to drive to the provincial capitol and show off his new car and wound up in Bagram where he was killed -- one of 37 homicides so far acknowledged by the US Army. His legs were "pulpified" according to the Army's medical examiner.There are three fundamental issues involved in the application of enhanced interrogation techniques. (1) Do they work? (2) Are they moral? (3) Are they legal? "Taxi to the Dark Side", for most of its length, seems to focus on the first question. Does torture work? Well, no it doesn't.That is to say, it's worthless if your goal is to get accurate information out of your subjects. But it may be well worthwhile if your aim to exact revenge upon people who look like the lunatics who flew airplanes into the WTC in 2001, people who speak the same language and come from the same area, the Middle East. Boy, are those Middle East folks alien to us. The language sounds like they're clearing their throats. They wear tablecloths on their heads. They dream of 72 virgins in Paradise. If you want revenge, these are your targets alright. I doubt that one out of a hundred Americans could walk up to a blank map on the wall and put his finger on Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Syria. We don't know anything about geography but we know what we don't like.The enlisted men who were tried for some of the crimes and interviewed for this film wouldn't say exactly that. For those who were willing to talk about it, they claim that their orders were vague. No officer was ever charged, while the enlisted men wound up with prison terms and BCDs.Also not spoken about -- probably because nobody knows about it -- are the taken-for-granted assumptions about relationships between guards and prisoners. It's all very well for us, sitting at home in our Naugahide recliners, to feel angry at the way the untrained and ill-led MPs performed but, as one of them says, "Try going over there and saying that." He's right. It has to do with role playing. It's not my opinion. It's established experimental fact. I refer anyone interested to Philip Zimbardo's famous "prison experiment" in the 1950s. It's probably available on Google.Well, you might ask, does anyone come out of this perfectly serious description of perfectly despicable acts looking good? Yes, in fact. The representative of the FBI argues persuasively that his agency was able to step out of the box and recognize what was happening. And a couple of politicians, like John McCain, coming late to the game expressed their disapproval in public.One is tempted to compare it to Errol Morris's "Standard Operating Procedure" but they're different movies with different ends in mind. Morris avoids easy judgments and asks in his usual philosophical way what the photos from Abu Ghraib "mean". This film is more interested in demonstrating what went on in the prison. I expected it to be an abusive moral diatribe but it turned out to be pretty instructive. We all know about the mistreatment, but I, at least, had never understood how endemic and intense it was. I give Gibney credit for not taking the easy route of bashing the suits in Washington more than they deserve, for not making fools of them more than they've done themselves. Only once, during a guided tour of Guantanamo Bay, does he turn sarcastic. As the cheerful guide (it's like a tour of Universal Studios) shows us the neat little cells with the neatly made bed and the comfortable slippers and the box of checkers on the night table, the pop tune "My Little Corner of the World" plays in the background -- ancient and mindless, kind of like torture.A depressing movie underneath it all.