Last month, Gibney's film Taxi to the Dark Side won the 2008 Academy Award for "Best Documentary" for its exploration of the Bush administration's policy on torture and interrogation at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram Detention Centers. He dedicated the film to its central character, a 22-year-old taxi driver from Afghanistan who was detained and later beaten to death by American soldiers in December 2002.
On his film
I think "Taxi" is a really a film about the
corruption of the American character and how a few rather weak and
panicked leaders meaning the highest ranking members of the Bush
administration decided to pursue a policy of torture and illegal
detention, which ended up not only damning us with bad intelligence, but
also corrupting our rule of law. So in that sense, it's not purely an
"Iraq" film. It's a film that journeys from Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib in
Iraq to Guantanamo to the White House. What the film does is show how
[those abuses] were not the result of a few bad apples, but are deeply
connected to policies that originated in Washington and were pursued in
Afghanistan and Guantanamo and elsewhere.
On the soldiers found guilty of torture
I expected,
initially, not to like them. Some of these guys, after all, had beaten a
very fragile young man to death. And yet, I came away from my very long
interviews with them being very sympathetic to the position that they
had been put in. They had been sent over to Afghanistan and Iraq with
very little cultural training, very little understanding of what their
mission was, very little understanding of how and why they should do
what they did. And they were pushed into doing things that, if you had
asked them back home, they never would have done, or never would have
wanted to see. So they come back very haunted, sometimes broken men.
On waterboarding
I'm astounded by this whole debate over
waterboarding, and this insistence by the administration that they want
to preserve the right to do so, even if its at some future time.
Waterboarding is torture. John McCain just said that on "60 Minutes"
last night. It's clearly torture, and its clearly illegal. And the idea
that [U.S. Attorney General] Michael Mukasey the highest
law-enforcement official in the land would say that he's "not quite
sure" whether or not it's legal is astounding to me. I think we've gone
a long way or this Administration has gone a long way in
shocking the rest of the world at the kind of depravity that we're
willing to entertain.