DCist Interview: Alex Gibney
Director Alex Gibney was recently nominated for his second consecutive Academy Award for his documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side. Gibney has a history of scathing documentaries investigating corporate and government wrongdoing. His previous film (also nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar), Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, examined the shocking levels of corruption at the top of one of America's largest corporations that ultimately led to its downfall, and before that he adapted Christopher Hitchens' damning profile, The Trial of Henry Kissinger for Eugene Jarecki's 2002 documentary. With Taxi, the director takes on the United States' interrogation policy, and the allegations of systematic torture that have been leveled at the Bush Administration in the wake of Abu Ghraib and the deaths of numerous detainees during the course of the war on terror.
The taxi in the title refers to Gibney's framing story, about an Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar who was taken in with three terror suspects who were riding in his cab, and never survived his time in custody. The driver, innocent of any wrongdoing, became a symbol for the abuses inflicted on prisoners in U.S. custody not just in Afghanistan, but in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay as well. Gibney structures his documentary as an investigative piece, trying to get to the bottom of just what happened to Dilawar, and uncovering a larger picture that is disturbing and gut-wrenching.
The continuing story of this one man, threaded throughout the high-ranking officials shown in the rest of the film, gives a face and a name to scores of victims who have suffered the same fate, making the issue of torture not just a policy argument, but a story of personal tragedy. The film also has obvious personal resonance for Gibney through his father, a WWII Navy interrogator who delivers an angry and moving attack (not long before his own death) on the practice of torture at the end of the film. Many of the interviewees have similar firsthand experience as expert gatherers of information from prisoners, and their collective condemnation of the administration's practices gives the film an angry motivation that coexists perfectly alongside its heartbreaking accounts and images of savage acts.
Gibney is in town for tonight's 7:10 p.m. screening of the movie at E Street, and will answer questions after the film. As of this writing, tickets are still available. The director also took the time to answer a few questions from DCist:
How did this project come about?
I was on a panel about my film, Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room with a man named Don Glascoff, a partner (now retired) at Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft. After the panel, he told me that he was furious about the Bush Administration's approach to detention and interrogation and how it was corrupting the rule of law. Would I, asked Don, do a film about torture and illegal detention?
Only a few days after, [former Clinton aide] Sid Blumenthal and [former Soros Fund managing director and congressional economist] Rob Johnson approached me with the same question. I had been deeply disturbed by the reports of detainee abuse so, despite the fact that I knew it would be a difficult film to make, I agreed to take it on.
What was the story you set out to tell initially, and how did that change as the project moved along?
I looked for a human story that would illuminate these big picture issues. The Dilawar story — as rendered by Tim Golden in the NY Times — seemed particularly poignant and right for a number of reasons. First, Dilawar was a pure innocent. His death at the Bagram Prison illustrated the dangers of the Bush Administration approach. Second, I was haunted by a detail in Tim's story. On the third day of a five-day interrogation, Dilawar's interrogators had concluded that he was innocent of any wrongdoing. Yet, his brutal abuse by interrogators and guards continued until he was dead. That testified to the inexorable momentum of torture: once you start it’s very hard to stop. Former Gen. Counsel to the Navy, Alberto Mora, refers to this syndrome in the film and gives it a name: “force drift,” the observed tendency of interrogators to keep “pushing the envelope” of violence to get results.
Third, the ripples from the Dilawar story spread throughout the detention and interrogation system. The MI Unit that interrogated Dilawar at Bagram was sent on to Abu Ghraib just before the abuses there. As Damien Corsetti, a soldier from that 519th MI Unit said in the film: "We used the same rules at Abu as we did at Bagram. And they wonder why it happened..."
The passengers in Dilawar's taxi were sent on to Guantanamo where, despite their complete innocence, they spent 15 months. That, in and of itself, illustrated a problem with the system — how Gitmo detainees could never confront the charges against them — but it also served as an important dramatic device to allow us to move to Guantanamo through our central story.
That said, there was much that we discovered in the process of making the film — documents, photographs, and extraordinary interviews with officials, soldiers, and prisoners — that constantly caused us to restructure the film. We didn't get it right until the very end.
What do you hope can be accomplished through this film? What is it you hope people take away?
I hope that people will be enraged at what the Bush Administration has done in our name — and to a great extent what we and our representatives have allowed to happen. We need to find a way forward to make ourselves a safer country and to recapture our place in the world. To do that, we need to reckon with the past, undo the damage done (rescind the Military Commissions Act and close Guantanamo) and be prepared to hold people accountable for crimes committed.
How did your own father, particularly his experiences as a military interrogator, impact the making of the film?
From the beginning, my father encouraged me to take this film on. Right up to his death, he kept asking me about it. He interrogated Japanese prisoners in World War II on Okinawa, one of the bloodiest battles of the war. The Japanese — like al Qaeda — were supposed to be too fanatical to reckon with as "normal" human beings. Further, we knew about the brutal treatment the Japanese inflicted on Allied troops. Nevertheless, it never occurred to my father — or to any of his commanding officers, or to the policymakers in Washington — to devise and execute a policy of torture in order to obtain information.
He was furious at Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld (whom he knew slightly) for betraying the values that he had fought for in World War II. When I visited him, just before he died, he asked me to get my camera. After we unplugged the oxygen machine so that the mic could pick up his remarks, he railed against the current administration and recalled that by not engaging in retribution, he got good, accurate intelligence while adhering to a high moral standard. “We never forgot,” he says in the film, “that behind the façade of wartime hatreds, there was a central rule of law which people abided by. It was something we believed in. It was what made America different.”
How were you able to obtain so many shocking images for the film that obviously weren't from media sources?
Soldiers cooperated with the film. Some were supplied by individuals, some I obtained from evidence released at trials.
What was your reaction to the candidness with which so many of the military personnel spoke, particularly those who were directly involved with the torture?
I was surprised that they spoke up but I think I know why. They were haunted by what happened over there and I think they wanted to talk. Further, while some did terrible things, they felt that they had been scapegoated in the sense those who ordered or condoned the abuse were barely investigated, much less convicted of any wrongdoing.
There's a fairly damning accusation made (by a number of sources, military sources at that) that the top brass (who claimed any torture was the action of a few "bad apples) would have seen things like the standing shackling and other interrogation methods during tours of the installations, Rumsfeld included. Have any of those people in positions of power responded to the accusation that they MUST have seen what was happening?
No response. And we have asked for it.
Who did you really want to get to appear in the film who declined? Was there anyone you figured you wouldn't have a chance of getting who surprised you by accepting?
I really wanted to talk to MI Captain Carolyn Wood. I followed her movements from Fort Huachuca [in Arizona] to Korea but was unable to persuade her to talk. Through an intermediary, she politely declined. She's not that high-ranking an officer, but she has critical information about how "enhanced interrogation" policies migrated from Bagram to Abu Ghraib. (In Steve Jordan's trial she apparently mentioned that "nudity" was an approved interrogation technique.) As a person between field soldiers and high-ranking officers, she knows alot, I'm sure.
There's a significant segment in the film focusing on John McCain, who obviously has some very strong feelings on the subject of torture, and was instrumental in challenging the practice. Did he come up a lot during your interviews with any of your subjects? Do you get the sense that this stance is one of the big issues that has made him such a target to hard line conservatives in this campaign?
He did come up a lot. And I think his stance on the Detainee Treatment Act was heroic. However, his cave-in (and I think that's the right word for it, even though McCain would disagree) on the Military Commissions Act was his way of reaching out to hard line conservatives in the Bush camp. Torture is a divisive issue among "movement conservatives." Cato Institute people rail against it. I honestly think torture is not what makes him a target for conservatives; it's what makes him suspect among Bush supporters.
Your best known previous projects, as a writer (The Trials of Henry Kissinger) and a director (Enron) definitely have an activist slant and are very important exposés of government and corporate malfeasance, as is Taxi to the Dark Side. What made you decide to take on a somewhat different project in your upcoming biographical doc about Hunter S. Thompson for your next film?
I wanted to have some fun. And I think Hunter has a great sense of humor. At the same time, I also think that Hunter had an acute moral compass. He saw politics as theater without losing a sense of the issues at stake. But I would also say that, like Hunter, my films are not like vending machines: put in the money and out comes the policy recommendation. People from all shades of the political spectrum enjoyed Hunter because he embraced the contradictions of everyday life. I hope people say the same about me.
In a perfect world, the most shocking thing about Taxi to the Dark Side would be that support for torture goes pretty much all the way up the chain of command, and that there's little remorse among those supporters. Sadly, it almost seems like a given with this administration, and that support seems more expected than shocking. With that in mind, what did you find surprising during the making of this film?
Yes. Even more so, I have come to believe that this administration has become deeply corrupted by torture. After all, torture has great political benefits: it allows the interrogator to get the intelligence that he wants to hear. That allows politicians who guide the interrogators to cover up ideology, mistakes, and crimes. Want evidence to buttress an invasion of Iraq? Well then, waterboard someone until you get it.
I don't think that this was a conscious plan from the start but, after Cheney, [David] Addington, [John] Yoo et al. were weak enough to devise a torture policy, they found it — consciously or unconsciously — to be politically expedient. That's the darkest part of the dark side — terrifying.