I finally got around to watching Alex Gibney’s Academy Award winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) which recounts the sordid story of the American government indefinitely detaining, torturing, and murdering people in its custody as a result of the so-called war on terror. I had avoided seeing it, since I knew I would be both sickened and angered by the images and descriptions of the treatment of prisoners. But the recent emergence from under whatever rock he lives in of Dick Cheney, the chief force behind these abhorrent policies, to promote his book made me decide that I had to see it.

The film takes its title from two key themes. One is the story of a young Afghan man named Dilawar who drove a taxi for a living but one day was picked up by Afghan security forces and turned over to the US as a suspected terrorist. He was taken to Bagram base and within five days he ended up dead, his body covered with bruises and his legs beaten into pulp, resulting in homicide being listed as the cause of death by the medical examiner. The other was Cheney’s statement that in the war on terror it was necessary for the US to go to the ‘dark side’ and do things in secret that were necessary to keep America safe.

I am glad that I saw the film but it is not for the squeamish. It vividly reminds one, using still and video footage and re-enactments, of the ghastly horrors that took place in US prisons at the Bagram base in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and Guantanamo. Here’s the trailer.

The whole torture process was an example of cynical manipulation. Aided by its legal advisors like Alberto Gonzalez, John Yoo, and Jay Bybee, the Bush administration created a policy that allowed even the most heinous of treatment. Yoo even refused to categorically rule out the right of the president to order the crushing of a child’s testicles in order to coerce the child’s father during interrogations.

This policy also seemed to be designed expressly to protect the high level people in the Bush administration (George W. Bush, Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, David Addison, Donald Feith, Lewis Libby, and other civilian and military high command) from any repercussions while allowing them, if things got messy, to pin the blame on the low-level people who actually carried out the acts. The way this was done was to let the word go out that the normal rules of operation (such as those specified under the Geneva Conventions and in standard US military guidelines known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice) were no longer operable but not specify in writing what the new guidelines were. Instead the low-level interrogators in the military and CIA were given a wink and a nod, suggesting that anything goes in the drive to get information. As a result, the interrogators were allowed to run amuck. And they did. We saw with the infamous Stanford prison experiment that even ordinary undergraduates can, in just a couple of days, become sadistic monsters when given unchecked power over other students who were just like them. You can imagine what can happen when soldiers in war are given even greater freedom over people whom they perceive as the enemy and are so different from them and who speak a different language.

Even in the face of stiff competition from a morally bankrupt administration, Cheney is clearly the most contemptible, a cowardly sadist, someone who seems to have a weird sense of pride in having caused the suffering and death of others, who has a grandiose image of himself as the savior of the country. This is a man who should be treated as a pariah, shunned by all decent people, not treated as simply another retired politician. While the whole Bush crew deserves to be tried for war crimes, he is the most deserving. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff, now says that he thinks that Cheney, for all his bravado, fears being tried for war crimes and that he would be willing to testify against him at a war crimes trial.

But of course, this will not happen in the US because, as Glenn Greenwald points out, Obama has shown himself to be as complicit in torture and war crimes as any member of the Bush regime and anxious to protect his predecessors and has effectively granted them blanket immunity. He does so because he is continuing and even expanding the detention and torture of prisoners. Obama even claims the right to execute US citizens abroad if he thinks they deserve it. The only way that any of these people will be prosecuted as war criminals is if they go abroad and encounter an independent-minded prosecutor in another country, since crimes against humanity have no jurisdictional or time limits.

As the documentary emphasizes, habeas corpus and the right of an accused to a trial by jury is the bedrock of the rule of law, a foundation of a civilized society, the violation of which was one of the crimes of British rule that was specified in the Declaration of Independence that precipitated the American revolution. Yet the US now casually disregards it. We accept as normal the indefinite detention of people without trial or access to lawyers merely on the government’s say so, kangaroo courts that are custom designed to secure pre-ordained verdicts, and the abuse, torture, and even murder of anyone the government decrees to be an enemy.

The moral corruption of the US government is deep and bipartisan. Perhaps the best we can hope for is that some day Americans will look back at the things that were done in its name by the US government in the war on terror and wonder with amazement how it could have been that such acts, though widely known, did not rouse the public into righteous anger at the subversion of all the values that a decent society should hold dear.