The Dark Side
Taxi to the Dark Side is showing at Upstate Films in nearby Rhinebeck. Alex Gibney, the director of this Academy Award winner for best documentary feature, will be at the Upstate tomorrow, March 16, at 1.00 PM.
The film offers an important and often painful-to-watch report about the torture and death of an innocent taxi-driver named Dilawar at the hands of American soldiers at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. A part of the film’s argument is also about the global migration of torture, which is to say that the strategies used at Bagram made their way to Guantanamo and then to Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Another part of the argument that also finds its echo in the film is that the torture used by the Americans, not on Dilawar but with many of those at Guantanamo, is the regime of sensory deprivation. This was a technique perfected long ago by the CIA and was based on solid psychological research. Both strands of information are fairly familiar to us because of the excellent reporting of journalists like Jane Mayer, and it is perhaps only in the telling of the individual story of the murdered taxi-driver that the documentary finds its beating heart.
Also, there is a less linear logic to be mined in the search of a global report on torture. Tyrannies buttress one another in different ways. And it is not just the Americans who get to be the actors strutting on the evil stage. This afternoon I sat down to read in the Winter 2007 issue of the magazine n+1, a powerful and quietly evocative report written by Basharat Peer. Basharat’s essay is a part of a forthcoming book, Curfewed Night, and is about a dark place in Kashmir called Papa-2. The essay is especially powerful because it begins as a memoir of childhood and, through the form of the narrative, shows how the innocence, that of children but also of a whole people, was destroyed under brutal repression. The piece is unfortunately not available online but here’s a paragraph from the piece:
One afternoon we were on the football field when a militant passed by. Even our snooty games teacher went up to him, smiled, and shook hands. The militant took off his loose pheran and showed us his gun. “We call it Kalashnikov and the Indians call it AK-47,” the militant said. We clapped. From then on we all carried our cricket bats inside our pherans, in imitation and preparation.
We are able to get a sense of Papa-2 also from another article written by Basharat, this one for Columbia Journalism Review, in which he notes:
Papa-2, the most infamous torture center in Kashmir, was housed in a colonial mansion on the banks of Dal Lake in the main city, Srinagar, and hundreds are believed to have been tortured there from the early to mid-1990s. While working on a book about the conflict in Kashmir, I interviewed many young men who had survived Papa-2. They carry deep scars on their bodies, some have lost kidneys, and many believe that because of electric shocks to their genitals they have become impotent, and as a result refuse to get into intimate relationships or marry. I knew one of those tortured men; he was the poetry teacher at my school. During the last seventeen years of the conflict in Kashmir, I have read many Indian newspapers and magazines but have yet to see a single magazine piece or detailed newspaper report in the Indian press examining the issue of torture.
Links to two other pieces by Basharat here and here.
