saraccan This is a documentary about how torture was normalized by Americans post-9/11. We see interviews with "interrogators", victims and other people who were involved with these actions and decisions. We learn about the "interrogation techniques" they used to get the necesarry information they need and/or they want. Its helpful if you were completely oblivious to what happened during those years, if not its still good.

danieln-15525 Fits the leftist agenda.Hollywood is leftist, that's why movies and TV shows are often leftist.

classicsoncall Combine the above sentiment voiced by one of the military men positioned as a prison guard in Iraq with the 'pressure to produce intelligence', and you wind up with the kind of conditions that existed at Abu Ghraib. Was it right? Of course not, and when all human dignity is taken away from a person with the brutal tactics shown in the documentary, it's difficult to understand that there may have been another side to the equation. I'm not condoning the actions of the personnel shown beating and humiliating their captives, but a film like this is never intended to show the flip side of the coin, that is, the atrocities committed by the other side. With entities like the Taliban or present day ISIS, there is no ambiguity in the way they treat their victims. Headless corpses don't get a chance to tell their side of things.

proterozoic A bomb went off, and we looked away. The medieval tableaux of Abu Ghraib did manage to shock us for a while. Then, some people were punished, and we convinced ourselves that was all of them.According to the Global Views survey, in 2010, 42 percent of Americans were in favor of "using torture to extract information from suspected terrorists." This is 6 points higher than in 2008; 12 points higher than in 2004. Could this become a majority soon? Are these people who have seen and remember those photographs? Have they reconciled themselves to such scenes? Could I? "Taxi to the Dark Side" is an exceptionally meticulous documentary that takes the case of an Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by interrogators at Bagram base in 2006, and puts it in the context of American anti-terror policy. It shows young soldiers with no training in interrogation, given vague instructions and strong expectations of results - and when the story goes public, they are hung out to dry. One interview, one document at a time, the fog of legal and moral ambiguity is dispelled, until televised denials by administration officials shrink to nothing next to a stark red pillar of human suffering.Maybe our culture won't let us believe that the good guys can do such things to innocent people. The detective throws down his badge and solves the case outside the system. He hits a man in the face; he gets a name. He pistol-whips another man; the man is reluctant, and he gets shot in the leg. A bartender gets dunked into dishwater. He almost dies, but gives up his contact.There was ambiguity in movies like The French Connection, but at some point, the detective stopped ever being wrong. This documentary makes a compelling suggestion that popular entertainment has helped spread the idea of justified and reliable torture.Taxi to the Dark Side won the Oscar for best documentary, and nobody saw it. It barely made a quarter of its budget. That's really too bad. It's a good idea for citizens to see it, then think about whether they believe that everything's OK.