When you plant a tree, you start with a seed, that will in time grow and blossom into a trunk. From there branches will sprout up and ascend, hopefully, full and orderly, but sometimes they can grow wild. I use this analogy because I feel it best describes government policies and how this documentary uncovers the information used here.

Governments plant a seed, say law or an order, then the trunk (politicians or generals) teaches and helps the branches grow (soldiers, let’s say) with that knowledge. All of this ideally speaking, of course. What happens when some of those branches grow astray?

This where Alex Gibney comes in, the director, and plants his seed. His seed is Dilawar, an Afghan who drives a taxi for a living, since he isn’t cut out for farm work. Gibney’s trunk is Tim Golden’s New York Times article of the interrogation of Dilawar, who was without a shadow of a doubt, innocent. Yet the article concludes with Dilawar’s death. Why?

"Taxi to the Dark Side" is a thorough investigation of key detention centers in Bagram, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and our policy of torture. Remember those photos of U.S. soldiers laughing and mocking those nude Iraqis? Much of the film covers all of the key members in those photos, the reasons why those humiliating acts occurred, and more importantly, following their orders from the change of command.

Clearly, torture is sadistic, whether is the "bad guys" or "good guys" doing it, and that’s why Geneva and the U.N. has set various laws and codes of conduct when handling POWs, because war can blind anyone. The film startles as it reveals through research, interviews, and news footage, how the Bush Administration, mainly Dick Cheney and Donald Rumbsfeld, used deceit and ambiguity to cloud intentions that can lead back to them direct orders of immoral torture. It’s a tough call to make, who’s wrong, when we are in this dogfight of a war against terrorism, but when basic human laws are taking away like habius corpus and when some intentions to mold or rewrite the Constitution are made, it’s not that hard to point fingers. Admit tingly, it has been easy to point fingers at this administration, but then from all their smoke and mirrors, when the smoke has cleared, we see them in the mirrors.

"Taxi to the Dark Side" might be a liberal documentary, but one that just examines the facts and tries to understand how torture is being used to obtain information. We’re the Land of the Free and we’ve stooped to torturing anyone. War has made a lot of people blind, due to the fear of terrorism, Gibney’s documentary makes us see that despite that fear we as people, as humans, must still handle and conduct ourselves and even our enemies properly and by a code of conduct. The film never takes a side much more than that, and it’s a respectable side to be on, but it does leaves us with one question: Directly or indirectly, if government officials break certain laws that can bring a trial against them for war crimes, like some Nazis in the Nuremberg Trials, then why can’t we bring Chaney, Bush, and Rumbsfeld in? It’s no spoiler that Dilawar was an innocent victim of wrong place, wrong time, and why after a few interrogators deemed him truly innocent, did they continue to torture him?