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Q&A: ALEX GIBNEY,
Director of Taxi to the Dark Side
SS: Politicians, I feel, have mounted a strong defense against criticism of detention centers. They say, for example, that American taxpayers are the ones who pay to have copies of the Qur’an sheathed in plastic before they're shipped to Guantanamo, so they never have to be handled by infidels. Or they point to the quality of the meals served there.
AG: That’s what they show you when they take you on the dog-and-pony show down there.
SS: And the euphemism of the day would have to be “the ticking time bomb.”
AG: That drives me up the wall.
SS: That euphemism allows stories like Dilawar’s to be swept aside. Is film the medium that can expose these truths?
AG: I hope so. Because I think one of the things that this film does and that a lot of others don’t, is it shows the process of corruption. And it also shows the process of momentum. It shows how torture is like a mutating, migrating virus: Once you start and let it loose, it twists and turns in ways you can’t predict. The problem with the ticking time bomb — even if you accept its logic, which I don’t, because it’s never happened — the problem is, they tried it once. It’s like a variant of Dershowitz’s torture warrants. They tried it in Israel, and what they discovered was that they were issuing torture warrants for everything but parking violations. Suddenly everything is a matter of life and death. How are you going to define what really is a ticking time bomb, or what might lead to one? So pretty soon you’re torturing everyone. And that’s what law is all about, because you don’t want justice to become a lynch mob. This whole issue of torture is not about interrogation techniques, it’s really about the rule of law and what separates us from tyranny. That’s fundamental.
SS: Mitt Romney says he’ll double the size of Guantanamo and it gets a rousing round of applause.
AG: He does, and you can understand why. It’s: “Let’s get tough.” But you have to ask yourself: Why is it good to get bad intelligence? Why is it smart to be stupid? Imagine a military commander who, every time a soldier got killed, said, “Fuck it, let’s go over the hill and take those fuckers!” Then they go into an ambush and get wiped out. Is that good? That’s revenge. That’s stupid. What people need to think about is that the lynch mob is not what we want to be. And Mitt Romney is saying, “Let’s be the lynch mob.”
SS: I like that you’re open about your cinematic references in your documentary work. I read you admire Luis Buñuel, which made me think of Belle de Jour. Perhaps that had some influence on you creating a film where masochistic sequences come out of a dream-state and catch viewers off-guard?
AG: It may have had some. I wasn’t thinking of Belle de Jour consciously while making the film. The only thing I can think of — and you pointed out — maybe it was unconscious, is the choice of the weird gamelan music we used during the interrogation of Muhammad al Katani, because there was something so wonderfully childlike, as if, in that torture, you were getting through to this weird place in the id where you’re at a kind cross between the prehistoric, limbic places in the brain and a childlike, dreamlike state. We could’ve chosen angry, heavy metal music. Also, that seemed to testify to the nicey-nice, smiley-face quality of Guantanamo. There were some places that used the Barney song to torture people. I considered using that. There was a lot of black humor in the film originally. It’s just, after Dilawar’s legs are pulpified, people were saying, “Give us this one straight, because it’s so brutal, we need to understand.”