Taking a Close-Up look at Torture

Documentary challenges our role in the wars we wage.

By Jay Thiemeyer, Street Roots

In the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, Alex Gibney tells the story of Dilawar, an Afghani taxi driver tortured for five days in the name of the War on Terror. Dilawar died as a result of the torutre. Photo courtesy www.taxitothedarkside.com

There are a rash of excellent, insistent films putting the lie to the White House’s lonely denial of the massive atrocity they triggered and continue to stoke.

Taxi was likewise exhaustive in its rundown of the issues: 83,000 detainees so far and not one brought to trial. The images we’ve seen of Abu Ghraib have only been a teaser, as grotesque as they were. Torture has claimed over 100 lives. The bizarre photos of Lynndie England and Charles Graner are tame compared to what was done to 22-year-old taxi-driver Dilawar in Afghanistan, dead after relentless beatings over five days. And if a journalist hadn’t discovered the death certificate with “homicide” written by the coroner as reason for death, given to his poor non-English speaking parents, the truth would remain hidden. In a nutshell, this film depicts the horror of torture. Like war, there is never a sufficient reason to employ torture. That we have accepted it as our country’s way of extracting the truth indicts all of us as patriots. Habeas corpus, on which this country was founded — freedom from arbitrary arrest by the King’s men — has been denied. It shows what the suspension of habeas corpus looks like today.

I watched an admiral, current commandant of Guantanamo, say recently to a group of veterans of foreign wars that we can’t afford to release these detainees “to just roam around” (he spoke their language), because they might do us serious harm. In other words, even if we admit we held the wrong people in detention without evidence, counsel, or trial, we can’t let them go because they’re pissed off at us for being assholes. We’d risk great harm to the country. Like the invasion itself, it would probably have helped to consider this before the torture. We’d be silly to let them go now, we might be liable for damages. For one thing — Catch-22 — it would mean admitting our mistake. And as with all totalitarian regimes, our government never makes mistakes.

It was not a mistake to pick up young taxi-driver Dilawar without probable cause or reasonable suspicion or warrant, only on the say-so of Taliban who wanted to deflect attention from themselves. It was not a mistake to torture him to death even though torture rarely if ever produces the truth. Quite the opposite. As Cheney said — oddly sounding like Barry Goldwater when he championed use of the atomic bomb — extraordinary circumstances and enemies require extraordinary tactics. “We must go to the dark side,” Cheney said. (But our leaders never make mistakes.)

Astonishingly, the number of detainees taken into custody by coalition forces accounts for only 3 percent of the total. The other 97 percent were turned in, like Dilawar, by Northern Alliance and Taliban fighters, paid sizable rewards for whomever they turned in. At one point, it is duly noted, these detainees amount to a huge public relations ploy, to give the impression that something has been done in the war against terror when the real instigators of the mayhem are almost entirely untouched.

As I watched the secret renditioning of detainees in the huge transports, I wondered how much those resources could provide us if dedicated to domestic needs. Suppose, instead of condoning and funding torture, we voted in politicians who worked for adequate dollars to reduce class sizes for the kids (and not No Child Left Behind and the corporate testers it nourishes). Or childcare for working people, or S-CHIP and single-payer universal health provision, instead of burdening the next generation with a debt as far as the eye can see and beyond, for war, torture, alienation of the rest of the world. But this is Cheney/Bush world and it will endure way past January 2009. There’s a tsunami of returning vets and anger at America to reap, and more homeless without limbs than you care to imagine.

There are some indelible images that come with this screening. There’s the prisoner masturbating into the faces of the audience. There’s the mother of Dilawar when told that her son is dead. Murdered. She is non-English speaking and so couldn’t read what was handed her by the non-Farsi speaking U.S. soldier, who briefly disengaged from his Hummer to hand the coroner’s report to her.

The question, in other words, prompted by this film, is how far are we from the unaccountable military occupation that killed Dilawar in Bagram? Meanwhile, Congress is considering the Intelligence Authorization Act of fiscal 2008, which would forbid the CIA from engaging in torture of any kind. It would as well forbid any other “instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location.”

As columnist James Carroll reports: “The legacy of Abu Ghraib, Gauntanamo, renditions and black sites would finally be sealed. The United States would bind itself to one standard of interrogation, completely prohibiting any form of torture.”

The nation would be back in line with standards of the Geneva Conventions in passing the legislation, and as a group of retired admirals and generals put it recently, with “the moral principles on which this country was founded.” Bush is expected to veto. They never make mistakes.

Reprinted from Street Roots