Guardian UK: America's heart of darkness

[marmar]

America's heart of darkness
Alex Gibney's Oscar-nominated documentary Taxi to the Dark Side exposes the Bush administration's culpability in the torture and murder of US military detainees
Steve Clemons

February 20, 2008 8:30 PM | Printable version


Damien Corsetti may be the Ron Kovic of our time. Corsetti is one of the featured commentators in Alex Gibney's powerful, Oscar-nominated film, Taxi to the Dark Side.

Unlike Kovic, Corsetti was not visibly, physically maimed and hasn't yet become a full-fledged anti-war radical, but he's someone whose soul seems to be struggling hard to cope with the ugliness of America's Darkness at Noon-style treatment of combat detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq. And he's letting you and me - those of us who remain distant from and have subcontracted out the task of crushing bad Muslims - see into his nightmares.

Corsetti was a military intelligence interrogator at military detention facilities the US managed at Bagram in Afghanistan and at Abu Ghraib in Iraq. He and some of his comrades in arms had a hand in torturing and eventually institutionally murdering a young, hopeful Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar who had just purchased his first cab as a way to help earn hard cash for his family. Corsetti was nicknamed "Monster" and the "King of Torture" by his fellow soldiers. He deployed a technique that many interrogators asked him to use called "Fear up, harsh".

I met Corsetti recently during an event I helped organise and moderate a few months ago at a screening of Taxi that Gibney was kind enough to let the New America Foundation and The Washington Note assemble.

In the darkness of the theatre, after Gibney's emotion-crunching film had finished rolling before 200 people who braved a full-force snow storm to attend, Corsetti's hugeness, his blunt honesty about his prison interrogation experiences - his words said and not said - offered up before us a man struggling with morality, afraid in a way to clearly blame his commanders for the hell he and other guards inflicted on their wards - the prisoners - of whom he said about 99% were completely and entirely innocent. But still beneath his cautious words was a gasping that it was them - that it was Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush, Addington and others - without saying their names. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/steve_clemons/2008/02/americas_heart_of_darkness.html