Expose of Cheney's  War Crimes Wins Oscar 

by Edward Spannaus 

Taxi to the Dark Side 

Written, directed, and narrated by Alex Gibney. 
Released by ThinkFilm. 

To the surprise of many, on Feb. 24, the Academy Award for 
the Best Documentary Feature went to Taxi to the Dark 
Side, a powerful and graphic portrayal of the abuse, torture, 
and murder of prisoners held by the U.S. in Afghanistan, 
Iraq, and Guantanamo. The film pins the ultimate responsibility 
for these atrocities on Vice President Dick Cheney 
and his collaborators at the top of the Bush Administration. 


In any other period, by any normal standard to which the 
United States has adhered throughout its history, what is depicted 
in Taxi would be regarded as war crimes--including by 
our impotent, do-nothing Congress. 

And, as the film points out, by the standards which the 
United States and its allies applied at the post-World War II 
War Crimes Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo, the most culpable 
for these crimes are not the enlisted men and women, 
the soldiers on the ground, who carried out what they believed 
to be the policies from the top. The culpable ones are those 
who designed the policy, and who let it be known down the 
chain of command, whether by direct orders, or innuendo, 
that the old rules of war no longer applied. 

The film's very title constitutes an indictment of the leading 
war criminal in this Administration. It is a reference to 
chilling comments made by Vice President Dick Cheney, just 
five days after the 9/11 attacks, and the full meaning of which 
has only become apparent over the past two or three years. 

In an Sept. 16, 2001 appearance on NBC's "Meet the 
Press," Cheney put the world on notice as to what he was 
planning. After dismissing the role of lawyers and legal process, 
Cheney laid out his intentions. 

"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you 
will," Cheney explained. "We've got to spend time in the 
shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be 
done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, 
using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence 
agencies, if we're going to be successful. That's the 
world these folks operate in, and so it's going to be vital for us 
to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our ob


jective.... It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out 
there, and we have to operate in that arena. I'm convinced we 
can do it; we can do it successfully. But we need to make certain 
that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence 
communities in terms of accomplishing their mission." 


NBC host Tim Russert, then asked, helpfully: "These terrorists 
play by a whole set of different rules. It's going to force 
us, in your words, to get mean, dirty, nasty, in order to take 
them on?" 

"Right," Cheney answered. 

The reference to the "taxi" in the title is to an Afghan 
farmer, known only as Dilawar, who was picked up while 
driving his taxi with three men accused of rocketing a U.S. 
base. In between interrogations at the improvised military 
prison at Bagram, Dilawar was shackled by his wrists to a 
ceiling grate, so that his feet barely touched the ground. 
When Dilawar refused to "confess," he was beaten during 
interrogations, and when he shouted and screamed in agony 
from the overhead shackling, he was repeatedly hit in the 
leg just above the knee, in what is called a "common peroneal 
strike." 

Dilawar died after five days of this treatment; a suppressed 
report by an Army coroner described the tissue in 
his legs as "pulpified," and said his legs looked as if they 
had been run over by a bus. Despite the coroner's report, the 
military went into a coverup mode. Dilawar was in fact the 
second detainee to die from beatings at Bagram; the Defense 
Department's press release said both had died of "natural 
causes." 

A later Army investigation revealed that most of those 
involved in the beatings that caused Dilawar's death, believed 
him to be innocent. The three passengers in his cab 
were sent to Guantanamo; they were eventually released 
without any charges ever being brought against them. And, 
as it later turned out, Dilawar and the other three had been 
handed over to U.S. forces by a local militia leader who 
himself was responsible for rocketing the U.S. base and 
then accusing others. 

After the Abu Ghraib revelations in 2004, the Army felt 
compelled to demonstrate that it was doing something, so it 
launched an investigation of the Dilawar case. Although authorities 
recommended that 27 officers and enlisted personnel 
be charged with criminal offenses, only seven enlisted 
men were actually charged. No officers were charged; in 
fact, the officer in charge of interrogations at Bagram was 
promoted and awarded a Bronze Star for Valor. 

The 'Fog of Ambiguity' 

How did it happen, that members of an Army, which has, 
on the whole, conducted itself honorably with respect to adversaries 
and prisoners for over 200 years, could commit 
atrocities such as documented in this film? 

In on-screen interviews with the soldiers from Bagram, 

50 Reviews EIR March 7, 2008 


they repeatedly emphasize that they were told that the Geneva 
Convention rules did not apply to their prisoners, but they 
were never told exactly what rules did apply. 

As is well known by now, there was a raging dispute in 
late 2001, within the Bush Administration and the Pentagon, 
over the applicability of the Geneva Convention to those captured 
in Afghanistan. 

At the height of this dispute, on Jan. 27, 2002, Cheney 
went on two Sunday talk shows, to declare his victory over 
Secretary of State Colin Powell's insistence that the U.S. adhere 
to the Geneva Convention. Asserting that Geneva didn't 
apply to terrorists, Cheney growled: 

"These are bad people. I mean, they've already been 
screened before they get to Guantanamo. They may well have 
information about future terrorist attacks against the United 
States. We need that information, we need to be able to interrogate 
them and extract from them whatever information they 
have." 

International law specialist Scott Horton1 was secretly 
contacted by military lawyers who were alarmed at what was 
happening. As he describes it in the film: 

"My first involvement in this came when I was visited 
by a group of very senior JAG [judge advocate general] officers 
more than a year before the first story about the Abu 
Ghraib broke, who were very troubled by what was going 
on. And the focus of their concern was failing in the responsibilities 
that the military leadership had to soldiers in the 
field--that was responsibility to provide fair, clear guidance 
to them as to how to behave in these difficult circumstances. 
And what they saw was an intentional decision taken 
at the height of the Pentagon, to put out a fog of 
ambiguity surrounding all of these issues. Coupled with 
great pressure to bring results. To be prepared to be violent 
with the detainees. But this violence with the detainees is a 
criminal act." 

One of the principal values of this film, is that it shows 
exactly how this "fog of ambiguity" played out, on the 
ground in Afghanistan--and later at Guantanamo and in 
Iraq. Through interviews conducted by filmmaker Alex 
Gibney, we see how soldiers from Bagram and Abu Ghraib 
succumbed to the pressures to extract "intelligence" by 
mistreating prisoners as they believed their chain of command 
demanded. The soldiers involved in beatings and 
deaths at Bagram are unambigious in their certainty that 
their officers knew exactly what was going on. They describe 
how officers were always coming and going through 
the prison. "Everyone wanted to see the terrorists," one 
says. 

Without getting legalistic, Taxi documents how the Bush-
Cheney Administration's interrogation and detention policies 
were worked out over the adamant objections of experienced 
military lawyers, and how these policies were transmitted 

1. See interview with Scott Horton, EIR, Jan. 28, 2005. 
down the chain of command to the interrogators and MPs, 
who were under intense pressure to "get the information"-- 
or, in Cheney's words, to "extract from them whatever information 
they have." 

Damien Corsetti, a hulking and poorly trained military interrogator 
at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, who was known as 
"Monster" and the "King of Torture," described the pressures 
on the interrogators: 

"'Soldiers are dying, get the information.... Get the information.'" 
That's all they were told, Corsetti says in the 
film. "Mr. Rumsfeld's office called our office frequently," he 
adds. "Very high commanders would want to be kept up to 
date on a daily basis on certain prisoners there. The brass 
knew. They saw them shackled, they saw them hooded, and 
they said, 'Right on. You all are doing a great job.'" 

"It's very clear that it starts in the office of VP Cheney," 
says lawyer Scott Horton in the film. "He had a very strong 
view that we were not as aggressive in dealing with people in 
interrogations as we could or should be. Taking the gloves off, 
being rough with detainees...." 

Or, as former JudgeAdvocate General of the Navy, retired 
Rear Admiral John Hutson, reports in the film: "The spine of 
the United States Armed Forces is the chain of command. 
What starts at the chain of command drops like a rock down 
the chain of command.And that's why Lynndie England knew 
what Donald Rumsfeld was thinking without actually talking 
to Donald Rumsfeld." 

War Crimes 

The horrors of the policies worked out by Cheney, 
Rumsfeld, and a handful of rogue lawyers working outside 
the U.S. military's well-established legal structure, hit the 
nation full-force with the disclosure of the Abu Ghraib photographs 
in the Spring of 2004, and have continued to spill 
out since that time, with new disclosures and admissions of 
secret prisons, extraordinary renditions, waterboarding 
(better termed "water torture"), and the like. Over 100 prisoners 
have died in U.S. custody during the so-called "war 
on terror." At least 30 of these are officially classified as homicides. 


AsCheney'slawyer DavidAddingtonwarnedina memorandum 
sent to President Bush in January 2002, the U.S. War 
Crimes Act mandates lengthy prison sentences and even the 
death penalty for grave breaches of the Geneva Convention. 
This and other memos confirm the simple truth documented 
in Taxi to the Dark Side. 

With its graphic and uncensored photos, this is not an easy 
film to watch--no matter how much you think you know 
about the events of the past six years. But no honest viewer 
can come away from it with any doubt of the fact that, for the 
first time in American history, top U.S. government officials 
deliberately and systematically directed and supervised the 
commission of atrocities which, by any fair definition, constitute 
war crimes. 

March 7, 2008 EIR Reviews 51