Down a Dark Road

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Former Army sergeant Sam Provance, a self-described "computer guy," got caught up in the investigation at Abu Ghraib. He was stripped of his security clearance for defying an order by talking to ABC News about the abuses. In Kennedy's movie, he sums up the atmosphere in the infamous prison as "like a combination of 'Apocalypse Now' meets the 'The Shining,' except that you know this is real and you're in the middle of it."

Today he's unemployed and sleeping on a relative's couch in Virginia -- he doesn't want to specify exactly where. The other day, smoking cigarettes in the back yard, Provance, 32, expanded on his five months working in military intelligence at Abu Ghraib. The use of dogs, he says, was imported directly from Gitmo: "When the Guantanamo crew showed up, a bad thing got worse."

A dog yelps in the background, as if on cue. "I feel bad just having been in there."

What bothers him most, though, is the stain on the U.S. Army. Torture was among the ostensible reasons we deposed Saddam Hussein, who had dispatched countless enemies to gruesome fates at the prison. "The two can't really be compared," he says. "That sort of thing was expected of Saddam -- he was your stereotypical tyrant -- whereas we are the bastion of ethics and morality in the world, holding the world accountable for wrongdoing."

So what happened at Abu Ghraib, he says, "is, in a respect, even worse."

Alex Gibney dedicates "Taxi" to the memory of his late father, Frank, who interrogated Japanese prisoners on Okinawa during World War II. "War crimes by Japanese were horrible," the filmmaker says. "We had every right to behave as the Japanese did but there was a sense of pride that we didn't do that. That's what made us different."

In the war against terrorism, he continues, "there is an argument made that this is a new kind of a threat: What kind of people would ram airplanes into buildings? Well, there were the kamikaze, but people like my father were able to talk to those people. And as fanatical as they may have appeared, they didn't have to waterboard them to get good information."

Administration lawyers say America's hands are clean, consistently denying that what happens to detainees is torture and drawing fine distinctions. The word torture, it seems, only applies to "intentional infliction of death or organ failure," Gibney says in summarizing a now-infamous 2002 Justice Department memo.

As President Bush himself said last September when the administration ran into congressional and legal opposition to CIA interrogation practices for terrorist suspects:

"This debate is occurring because of the Supreme Court's ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention, and that Common Article 3 says that, you know, there will be no outrages upon human dignity.

"That's like -- it's very vague. What does that mean, 'outrages upon human dignity'? That's a statement that is wide open to interpretation."

Horton, who has screened both films for his Columbia University law students, has one way of focusing the debate. He says he instructs them, "When you see these techniques being used, imagine that the detainee is a young American soldier. What would your reaction be? If it is one of outrage, then it is not the right technique."

Larry Wilkerson, a 31-year Army veteran, most certainly agrees. Now teaching a national security course at George Washington University, he screened "Taxi" for his students to help them focus on the results of making a change at the top in detainee policies. "You have to make sure every private at the bottom knows how to carry these decisions out," he says.

"If cinema is the highest American art form, and I believe it is," he adds, "then why not use that tool, that most effective tool, and certainly one that young people are drawn to, to get across that message, and to cause people to critically think about these things."

Such documentaries may never become blockbusters, but they do serve a higher role: as truth commissions for a wartime America. Toward that point, Wilkerson cites Friedrich Nietzsche: When you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.