Down a Dark Road

Acting on ambiguous, wink-and-a-nod guidance from the top, the soldiers say they worked Dilawar over so harshly because that's what their jobs demanded of them. Officers wanted results in the war on terrorism, Geneva Conventions aside, and word came down that the gloves must come off.

Who gave the word? Well, that's the problem: The accountability trail up the chain of command is obfuscated by carefully parsed legalese, willful blindness and butt-covering.

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Gibney's film shares many of the themes and conclusions of another documentary, "Ghosts of Abu Ghraib," directed by Rory Kennedy (the youngest child of RFK) and released by HBO in February. Next up: An Errol Morris documentary on Abu Ghraib, "S.O.P: Standard Operating Procedure." Still in production, it's about "the soldiers and the role of photography in misleading the press and the public about what happened there," Morris says in an e-mail. In 2004, the director's examination of Robert McNamara and Vietnam in "The Fog of War" won an Oscar.

Watching "Ghosts" and "Taxi," it's hard to believe that young enlisted men and women -- mainly unseasoned members of military police and military intelligence units -- suddenly became sadists, inventing new harsh and dehumanizing tactics on their own.

Some tactics in Iraq and Afghanistan seem to stem from interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay, which the films conclude had mutated like a virus to other sites. These included sexual humiliation specifically meant to affront Muslim taboos, such as forced nudity, the draping of women's underwear on Arab men, or sexual come-ons from women soldiers; the menacing use of dogs (which are considered ritually unclean animals in Islam and rarely kept in homes); and sensory and sleep deprivation.

Both films contain unpublicized, highly explicit photos and videos from Abu Ghraib that leave the viewer queasy. Were those naked human pyramids really akin to fraternity hazing, as some conservative commentators suggested? Was it just a matter of " 'Animal House' on the night shift," as James Schlesinger, the former defense secretary, said after turning in his Abu Ghraib report?

If a man is forced to masturbate in front of his captors, is that not torture?

The Pentagon reaction after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke can be summed up as "blame the grunts, then court-martial them to deflect attention from the policy aspect of this," Scott Horton, a noted human-rights lawyer who offers commentary in both films, says in an interview. "But what happened flowed directly from the policy decisions that were taken at the top to use highly coercive techniques."

Both films also force us to contemplate what we ask of those who fight our wars. "You put people in crazy situations, people do crazy things," as Corsetti says in "Taxi to the Dark Side." "I can tell you we set the same policy at Abu [Ghraib] as we set at Bagram. Same exact tools. Same thing was going on."

He was among several members of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion at Bagram who ended up at Abu Ghraib.

Corsetti, who was acquitted of all charges in the Bagram investigation, pauses and wryly chuckles. "And they wonder why it happened."