About six weeks before he passed away, Alex Gibney’s father, once a Naval interrogator during World War II, and later a journalist himself, unhooked his oxygen tank and asked his filmmaker son to get his video camera. Frank Gibney wished to speak about the subject of torture and how outraged he was at the revelations about the use of torture on prisoners in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Afghanistan. Specifically, the elder Gibney directed his indignation at the leaders (you know them, but for the record, they include George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzalez), who he believed the buck stopped with. Frank Gibney had interrogated Japanese prisoners during the battle of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest, and although they were dealing with that era’s version of suicide bombers in the form of kamikaze pilots, Gibney and his fellow soldiers chose not to cross the line into brutality. When asked why not by his son, Frank Gibney replied that to do so would be to sacrifice the very values they were fighting for. Alex Gibney elaborates, “It’s not to say that there weren’t suspensions of human rights during World War II. The Japanese Internment Camps in particular come to mine. But it was so far from my father’s frame of reference that FDR would have condoned torture. One of the things that he was fighting for, particularly against the Japanese, who did torture prisoners, was for a better possibility.” Alex Gibney’s interview with his father closes his new documentary on the use of torture during the War on Terror, entitled Taxi to the Dark Side, a film which should be required viewing for every American, from the highest towers of political power to the youngest soldiers in the field. Gibney’s latest continues his examination of the force of corruption, explored via the business world previously in his documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and how it virals itself into every part of an organization, whether that be a company or a country, when immorality is left unchecked, or condoned, by the people at the top of the power structure.
Water boardingg is soooo much worse and has a similar result.
