ARCHIVE
Q&A: ALEX GIBNEY,
Director of Taxi to the Dark Side
SS: I think torture is perhaps the key issues of our time, but I have a weak stomach, or a weak enough disposition that I have to view it at a distance. What’s it like to fully immerse yourself in a story like Dilawar’s, in all its graphic detail?
AG: You can understand the “forced drift” that [Navy General Counsel] Alberto Mora talks about [in an interview in the film]. Because, as you immerse yourself, it’s like being a doctor: You can’t be squeamish about blood and work in an emergency room. Over time, you start to make dark jokes. Same thing when you see these images of torture over and over again: Your capacity to endure them increases. But they’re having an effect on you that you can’t quite quantify or understand. It begins to make you more irritable, more cranky, more unable to appreciate generosity. It makes you a crueler person, I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. And yet we have within all of us, the ability and the capacity to go there at different times. It was disturbing. Just on a technical level, we would actually have to ask other people to come in the cutting room and look at a sequence. We’d ask if we could show this. They would say, “No, you can’t show this. That’s too much.” Because we had crossed a line, and we couldn’t tell anymore.
SS: What was the vetting process for using uncensored Abu Ghraib images in the film? Was there any kind of additional clearance you had to get?
AG: No. We got a hard drive from a soldier. You can go on Salon and see a pretty carefully cataloged selection of those images. We had some that I think a lot of people hadn’t seen before, and there were a lot of them that we have that are far more extreme. Errol Morris probably has even more than the amount that we had. And in addition to the photographs, we had some Quicktime [clips], too, some of which we showed in the film. What was amazing to us, when we looked at these images, was how much hadn’t been shown.
SS: Can you tell our readers who Stanley Milgram was?
AG: I’m obsessed with Stanley Milgram, I confess. He was in the Enron film. I did a film called The Human Behavior Experiments for the Sundance Channel about Milgram, the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Columbia experiments. Stanley Milgram was a professor at Yale who conducted a very famous experiment that was parodied in Ghostbusters called the Milgram Experiment. Basically, it was supposed to be an experiment about whether or not negative reinforcement will help people learn. So you have a teacher who is supposed to sit there, and he has a big array of dials that are supposed to be attached to voltage: 10 volts, 20 volts, all the way up to 450 volts. You’re going to ask somebody a question on the other side of this screen. If they get the question wrong, you’re supposed to shock them. If they get another question wrong, you’re supposed to shock them, but at a higher voltage.
The experiment, of course, was really measuring to what extent the person who is administering the pain, how far he will go in administering pain and inflicting pain on another human being as part of an experiment, if the person in the white lab coat standing next to him says it’s okay. Milgram originally designed the experiment to be about obedience, because he was interested in what had happened during the Holocaust. So what Milgram discovered was that 65 percent of the people who took part in this experiment pushed the 450-volt button, which would have been certain death. And this was after hearing screams and all sorts of pain on the other side. The Milgram Experiment teaches us a lot. I think people, though, sometimes limit the value of the experiment. They think it’s only about if people will obey, and of course some of them didn’t. Thirty-five percent said no—they opted out. But the other thing it’s about, I think, is corruption. The brilliance of Milgram’s experiment was that he designed an incremental system. If he had asked people to just push a 450-volt button, I don’t think they would have done it. But he has them start at 10. That seems so easy. “It’s not such a big deal. Oh, I cheat on my taxes. Not a big deal. Like the people at Enron: They started with a little bit, and a little bit, then a little bit more. Or like the people who start to torture: A little bit, a little bit. Next thing you know, forced drift. You’re way over the line. That’s one of the key things that Milgram looked into that I think people glossed over.
SS: To me, a great service of the film is that is shows how the simple act that Rumsfeld belittled—standing on your feet all day—can actually be lethal.
AG: That’s Dilawar. Dilawar was, in effect, being forced to stand, as part of his sleep-deprivation program. That forced-standing forces all sorts of blood down your legs. The human body is not designed to stand in one place. If you do, all sorts of terrible things happen. In the case of Dilawar, it was exacerbated by blows to his leg, which ultimately caused a pulmonary embolism and killed him. So this stuff is time-tested—and it’s time-tested by very brutal societies like Khmer Rouge, the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communists—and always designed to elicit false confessions. It’s so brutal, it works — and it doesn’t leave any marks. So Rumsfeld can mock it, but the fact is we’ve studied it and we adopt and we train our soldiers in how to resist it, because we know how brutal it is. It’s real.