Another model piece of documentary filmmaking from the hugely talented American director Alex Gibney who, in 2005, accomplished the not inconsiderable task of diluting the entire Enron saga down to 110 bloodcurdling and blackly comic minutes with Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room. This follow-up peruses a similar theme: the ways in which the regular working stiff becomes morally accountable for actions dictated and adjudicated by the bureaucratic powers-that-be in a capitalist society. It’s also no laughing matter.
In 2002, an Afghan taxi driver was picked up and whisked off to a US military prison at Bagram Air Base, charged with being an accessory to a rocket attack on American troops alongside the men in the back of his cab. Five days later he was reported dead from massive haemorrhaging in the legs, the result of beatings dished-out by the US guards, all under order to extract ‘information’ from the inmates. Gibney uses the fine details of this squalid episode as a springboard into investigating how the US conducts warfare in the modern age.
With its incisive narration, erudite talking heads and turn-your-head-away archive footage (mainly the notorious snaps of sexual humiliation of the similarly-managed Abu Ghraib), the film concisely and convincingly essays how the US government ritually contravenes statutes of the Geneva Convention to justify its search for swift, aggressive justice post-9/11.
It’s a bracing and satisfyingly detailed investigation of the type you might read in the pages of the New Yorker. Gibney’s commitment to truth-seeking gives his film a refreshing, scholarly edge, especially as he doesn’t fall into the same trap as so many other liberal documentary makers (Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock) in using cleverly juxtaposed soundbites by US politicians to back up arguments, then berate the very same rhetoric and spin as being used to ‘sell’ the public ideas and policy.
