WP: Down a Dark Road (re: murders of detainees)

[MountainLaurel]

A new documentary from the makers of "Enron: The Smartest Boys in the Room". It looks like another must-see for DUers.

In 2002, a young Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who'd never spent a night away from his dusty little village, got lost in the fog of war and took a wrong turn into an abyss from which he would never return. It was a detention center at Bagram Air Base, where he was grilled on suspicion of being a Taliban fighter. Military interrogators hung him from a cage in chains, kept him up all night and kicked him senseless, turning his legs into pulp.

He lasted only five days. The Army initially attributed his death to natural causes, even though coroners had ruled it a homicide. Low-level soldiers were punished. It turned out that Dilawar (who, like many Afghans, used only one name) was not an enemy fighter, had no terrorist connections and had committed no crime at all.

"He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He was the wrong man," says filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose latest documentary, "Taxi to the Dark Side," puts the fate of one hapless, ordinary Afghan into a larger and more disturbing context. Its focus is torture, and whether torture became a deliberate component of U.S. policy at places like Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

Researchers at Human Rights First have categorized more than 70 detainee deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as homicides linked to gross recklessness, abuse or torture. The findings are based largely on the military's own records, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, according to Hina Shamsi, an attorney for the organization.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/26/AR2007042601569.html