Taxi To The Dark Side By Alex Gibney

Admittedly, the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side, directed by Alex Gibney, was incredibly hard to watch. The imagery and narrative was completely overwhelming in its portrayal of the explicit human rights violations that were perpetrated by the US military and government in Afghanistan and Guantanamo bay. What directly comes to mind while viewing this documentary, is the blatant twisting of the American exceptionalism for political means.
The democratic fundamentals of the American constitution, originally perpetuated the notion that the US was exceptional in its protection and emphasis of the Rule of Law and the rights of the individual protected within the constitution. This is best exemplified in the last moments of the documentary where the director’s father Frank Gibney, a former WWII Navy Interrogator, states that in WWII the Americans were the “good guys” fighting against the atrocities of fascism and the inhumane treatment of individuals. This narrative of American Exceptionalism, as both Davis and Gibney exemplify, has
drastically changed since the events of 9/11, stating that the exceptional attributes of the American system, is the exceptional way in which executive power can be wielded to completely circumvent international and domestic constitutional law when required.
This documentary connects well with Jeffrey Davis’ article Uncloaking Secrecy: International Human Rights Law in Terrorism Cases. Both Davis and Taxi Ride to the Dark Side, establish that there is inherent American Exceptionalism within the confines of the War on Terror. As clearly stated by Former Vice President Dick Cheney, the American government has been forced to “get mean dirty and nasty”, because of the “behaviour” of the people deemed to be terrorists. Cheney thus advocated for the extra-legal strengthening of the executive power, described in Davis’ article. Davis mentions that the government’s ability to invoke “state secrets privilege” allows for legal cases to be obstructed as the American government refuses to divulge key evidence pertaining to the case. This use of state secret privilege and redaction was rampant throughout the investigations pertaining to the conditions and abuses conducted in Afghanistan. The US military redacted large amounts of information to protect a barbaric system of human intelligence collection, which has proved to be ineffective and unreliable. Thus, the secrets that the military was protecting was the depth of their depravity and political optics, rather than information that was integral to national security.
Within this trend of post 9/11 American Exceptionalism, the main tool used to execute such massive overhauls of legal jurisprudence is the use of redefinition for political and psychological means.
Politically, the Executive Branch and the military changed the definition of a prisoner of War to Enemy Combatant to circumvent international and domestic law. As presented in Taxi to the dark Side, this meant that a person under American custody was not protected under the Geneva conventions. This redefinition served as a reconceptualization of what it means to be human, an individual’s eligibility to rights, and demonstrated the limitations of the use democracy under the Bush administration. The Bush Administration, created an environment where individuals could exist in a state of limbo, not being covered by the Rule of Law, and thus outside the parameters of democracy, the very thing that the Bush Administration was attempting to
protect.
Additionally, there was a considerable amount of psychological redefinition that occurred to make this type of torture palatable to the soldiers in Abu Ghraib and Bagram. In these torture and interrogation programs there was the complete dehumanization and destruction of the “sanctity of the individual”. In Spt. Ken Davis’ testimony, he describes the dehumanizing process, stating that he was instructed to view the alleged terrorists as “less than human”, and without names stripping them of any human identifiers. This allowed Davis to relinquish his inhibitions surrounding more intense forms of torture, and gave him the ability to carry out such grave acts. These processes of dehumanization are not unique to this situation, the most famous example would be the dehumanization of Jews in the Holocaust, but can also be seen in the Rwandan Genocide where the Tutsi were referred to as “cockroaches”, implying a level of biological inequality.
The narrative of US intervention in Afghanistan and the War on Terror have not ceased since the making of this documentary in 2007. Which begs the questions, what has been done to combat this issue since and what are current policies surrounding this issue, ten years on?