ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Robert Siegel.
MELISSA BLOCK, host:
And I'm Melissa Block.
In December of 2002, a 22-year-old Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar was detained and sent to Bagram Air Force Base for interrogation by U.S. soldiers. Dilawar was suspected of involvement in a rocket attack against U.S. troops. Five days after his interrogation began, he was dead.
(Soundbite of film "Taxi to the Dark Side")
Unidentified Man #1: There was, like, four MPs on this guy, and one of the MPs just kept giving him kidney shots. The other two - they had slammed him to the ground, and then the fourth one, like, jumped on his back. He got a big gash on his nose.
Unidentified Man #2: There was no reason to hit him. Let's remember he's shackled.
Unidentified Man #3: Even when the control was an issue, it became, well, I'm just gonna do this to get mine in. And that's probably why they got in trouble.
BLOCK: Those voices of soldiers at Bagram and a prisoner who witnessed the abuse are heard in a new documentary called "Taxi to the Dark Side." It links the abuses at Bagram with techniques used at Guantanamo, and later, at Abu Ghraib.
The film was written and directed by Alex Gibney, who also made the documentary "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," a portrait of another culture that ran amok.
Gibney explains that Dilawar's death might have gone unnoticed if it weren't for one clue.
Mr. ALEX GIBNEY (Director, "Taxi to the Dark Side"): Initially, the Army said he died of natural causes, but an investigative reporter for The New York Times, Carlotta Gall, went to his family's village in Yakubi where the body had been returned. And they had a small document they couldn't read. It was a death certificate. And clipped on the death certificate was a little note that said, cause of death: homicide.
BLOCK: There was a lengthy investigation into that death. There was, ultimately, the prosecution of a number of soldiers involved. The testimony that was taken from the coroner in this case was really startling in terms of what she saw on his body.
Mr. GIBNEY: Yes. Her technical conclusion was, in effect, his legs had been pulpified. She said that had he survived, his legs almost certainly would have had to have been amputated.
BLOCK: You interviewed a number of interrogators, military police who worked at Bagram, were involved in the investigation, at least one who was involved in beating Dilawar. How did you get them to agree to be interviewed?
Mr. GIBNEY: That was very tricky and it took a long time. In part, I think, some of them came forward because they felt they had been scapegoated. I think the best of them felt and admitted that they had done something terribly wrong, but they didn't understand why they were being punished when the people who ordered them to do what they did, or at least condoned it, weren't even investigated, much less punished.
BLOCK: One of the soldiers you talked to is Sergeant Thomas Curtis who is a member of the military police at Bagram. And he talked about the culture of the techniques that were used on prisoners there.
(Soundbite of film "Taxi to the Dark Side")
Sergeant THOMAS CURTIS (U.S. Military Interrogator): Some would say, well, hey, you should have stopped this. You should have stopped that. When you saw he was injured or saw he was being kicked on this, why didn't you do something? Which would be a good question. And my answer would be, well, it was us against them. I was over there. I didn't wanna appear to be going against my fellow soldiers, which - is that wrong? You could sit here and say, that was dead wrong. Go over there and say that.
BLOCK: It doesn't sound to me like a man who is second-guessing what happened there so much.
Mr. GIBNEY: No, but I think he - you know, Thomas Curtis makes a very important point. You know, this is a battlefield environment. These guys are seeing their buddies killed and doing what they need to do. And I think it's a fair comment, but at the same time, it's not an excuse. What was happening at Bagram was that there was an environment established by superior officers that allowed things to go far afield from military regulations. And it was in that context that these guys at the bottom of the chain of command were put into a position to do terrible things.
BLOCK: The notion that these soldiers were following orders or just doing what they were told, you know, there were moments at which I found that just implausible. And I actually went back and looked at a reporting that was done about Damien Corsetti - he was one of the interrogators you interview…
Mr. GIBNEY: Yeah.
BLOCK: …who comes across fairly sympathetically in the movie. But when I went back and looked at the reporting, he was accused of unspeakable acts, ultimately acquitted at trial, but, you know, he was known as the king of torture - had the word monster written across his stomach. I wonder if there was a danger in sanitizing what the lower level soldiers did to make a broader point about the chain of command and who, ultimately, was responsible.
Mr. GIBNEY: Well, I hope I didn't sanitize it in the film. I mean, I did include some details that were pretty graphic about what some of these kids did. And there's also, you know, in the medical technology, in the military - literature, a phrase called force drift, which means that when superior officers remove some of the guidelines and rules and regulations by which you normally operate, suddenly, that person across the room from you you're interrogating - you push the envelope a little bit, then you take it one step further, and further, and further. You know, with some place like Abu Ghraib, you can't say that superior officers ordered the people on the ground to pile naked bodies into pyramids, but I think superior officers set the overall context in which these kind of abuses could occur.
BLOCK: There weren't a whole lot of voices from - within the administration or former administration officials with the exception of John Yu, a very prominent proponent and creator of administration policy at the time. Did you try to get other voices and failed?
Mr. GIBNEY: Yes. I tried very hard. I mean, I tried the obvious people up at the top of the chain of command, but I also tried very hard to get to one woman who, I think, was kind of a key, pivotal figure, a captain named Caroline Wood who was in charge of the 519th military intelligence unit at Bagram. And then Caroline Wood was promoted after Dilawar's death, awarded the Bronze Star for Valor and then sent on to Abu Ghraib just before the scandals at Abu Ghraib broke, but she never agreed to talk to us.
BLOCK: You know, Alex, your film has a lot of images that are iconic now of what happened at Abu Ghraib, but there are a number of others - you know, still images and video - that are far more graphic than, I think, many of us have seen. Did you worry about the effects of including those in your film and what might result from that?
Mr. GIBNEY: Yeah. I worried about the worldwide reaction. Yet at the same time, I felt that in some way, making the film was a kind of patriotic act. I mean, I think after this abuse has taken place, one of the things we as a nation have to do is show the rest of the world that we're capable of investigating ourselves. I felt that it would - in fact, in a peculiar way - enhance our reputation.
BLOCK: Were there any images that you decided you just couldn't use, they were too shocking?
Mr. GIBNEY: Yes. I mean, we argued about this in the cutting room all the time. There were images that were far more graphic than the images that I showed in the film. And my editor, Sloane Klevin, and I would constantly wrestle with this. But over time, we became desensitized. And we would put stuff into the film and we would constantly have to bring in other people to take a look. And sometimes they would just shake their heads and look at us, like, you people have left the building. You know, you can't show that image. And we take it out.
BLOCK: What does that say, do you think?
Mr. GIBNEY: I think it says that we all have a capacity to go over to the dark side, and I think we constantly struggle with where we are. When the bonds are released and there is no kind of net - social net, moral network for us to rudder against, things can get very ugly.
BLOCK: Alex Gibney, thanks very much for talking with us.
Mr. GIBNEY: Thank you, Melissa.
BLOCK: Alex Gibney, director of "Taxi to the Dark Side." He also has a personal connection to the subject. His father, Frank Gibney, was a U.S. military interrogator during World War II.
You can hear Alex talk about how his father's experiences influence the film, and you can hear from Frank Gibney himself at npr.org.