Okay, well, let me say that I'm very glad to see Alex Gibney's brilliant Taxi to the Dark Side win Best Documentary. I've recommended it twice before, but perhaps you didn't trust me. Now you know: It won an Oscar. Go see it.
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Taxi Wins
24 Feb 2008 11:17 pm
Comments (15)
Touching comments by the filmmaker, too. He dedicated the win to the Afghan taxi driver and his (the filmmaker's) late father, a former Navy interrogator who was disgusted by the turn our nation has taken. Very moving.
Ha - the funny thing is that your recommendation means alot more than the Oscar does.
Unfortunately, Taxi isn't on iTunes. Anyone know an Apple-compatible site to buy/rent it from?
As an aside, I think I've got a high-level handle on why the various blogs The Atlantic hosts are so slow. They all seem to be hosted on the same server, which is running Moveable Type Enterprise. Chances are, the MT data is hosted by the same Oracle database that the rest of The Atlantic website is. If, for some reason, the database is served by a single instance of MySQL or Postgres rather than Oracle, that would explain a lot.
In any case, on the off chance the boys and girls running The Atlantic's web servers haven't had time to tune MT yet, here's one of many sites with tips on improving performance.
I don't know how "Persepolis" or "Caramel" did, but both are great reminders that people in the Middle East are human just like us.
Pfffft. King of Kong wasn't even nominated.
King of Kong wasn't even nominated.
If recent reports are true, the guy who made KoK pulled some really despicable shit in making that movie.
I think it's always important to point out that the innocent taxi driver in question was not just tortured, but crucified.
The really sad thing is that there was even a need for this documentary to be made.
I think it's always important to point out that the innocent taxi driver in question was not just tortured, but crucified.
Posted by SAO
The Left's love for Islamic terrorists is a never-ending source of amusement for me. At least Lord Haw-Haw was honest when he refuted that his love for Fascism was a love that did not dare speak it's name. Lefties should emulate him. You hate America, you hate the West, you love Islamic "bad boys" you can enjoy your hate vicariously through.
Say it. Don't closet yourselves!
This is a guy who gave money for Bosnian terrorists and visited their camps, ran a Jihadi bookstore that was a contact point for terrorists, attended 3 terrorist training camps in Afghanistan where he learned improvised bomb-making left documents at two, and was at Tora Bora.
His story was like thousands of other non-Pashtun Muslims from 1999-2001, he was driven by a sudden intense desire to bypass going in with any known charity group intense desire to move to Afghanistan to herd goats, teach, learn better Arabic from illiterate tribsmen with a unique dialect...then the mean, mean Americans found him and persecuted his innocent ass.
And made a movie.
I didn't enjoy it. Maybe it was because Tom Friedman sat next to me and kept talking to the screen.
If recent reports are true, the guy who made [King of Kong) pulled some really despicable shit in making that movie.
If by "despicable shit" you mean "condensed some of the facts in order to not make things convoluted and boring," then yeah.
I just can't envision Taxi without Judd Hirsch or Christopher Lloyd.
So--sorry, I'll pass.
Really, chris? And these "facts" about the taxi driver in question came about under oath at at trial where he got due process and the ability to defend himself against whatever charges and face his accusers before he faced American punishment??? I thought so.
It's not that "Lefties" "hate America" and "hate the West". But what we do hate are those who so quick to ignore and abuse those consitutional and legal norms that specifically define America and the West. And people like you seem to so unquestioningly and aggressively defend such practices. Who really hates America, Chris?
Really, chris? And these "facts" about the taxi driver in question came about under oath at at trial where he got due process and the ability to defend himself against whatever charges and face his accusers before he faced American punishment??? I thought so.
No, of course not. He's lying through his teeth. This is the true account of who Dilawar, the young taxi driver tortured to death by American soldiers, was.
In U.S. Report, Brutal Details of 2 Afghan Inmates' Deaths
By TIM GOLDEN
The story of Mr. Dilawar's brutal death at the Bagram Collection Point - and that of another detainee, Habibullah, who died there six days earlier in December 2002 - emerge from a nearly 2,000-page confidential file of the Army's criminal investigation into the case, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times....It would be many months before Army investigators learned a final horrific detail: Most of the interrogators had believed Mr. Dilawar was an innocent man who simply drove his taxi past the American base at the wrong time.
....Four days before, on the eve of the Muslim holiday of Id al-Fitr, Mr. Dilawar set out from his tiny village of Yakubi in a prized new possession, a used Toyota sedan that his family bought for him a few weeks earlier to drive as a taxi. Mr. Dilawar was not an adventurous man. He rarely went far from the stone farmhouse he shared with his wife, young daughter and extended family. He never attended school, relatives said, and had only one friend, Bacha Khel, with whom he would sit in the wheat fields surrounding the village and talk. "He was a shy man, a very simple man," his eldest brother, Shahpoor, said in an interview.
On the day he disappeared, Mr. Dilawar's mother had asked him to gather his three sisters from their nearby villages and bring them home for the holiday. But he needed gas money and decided instead to drive to the provincial capital, Khost, about 45 minutes away, to look for fares.
At a taxi stand there, he found three men headed back toward Yakubi. On the way, they passed a base used by American troops, Camp Salerno, which had been the target of a rocket attack that morning.
Militiamen loyal to the guerrilla commander guarding the base, Jan Baz Khan, stopped the Toyota at a checkpoint...The four men were detained and turned over to American soldiers at the base as suspects in the attack...Mr. Dilawar's three passengers were eventually flown to Guantánamo and held for more than a year before being sent home without charge. In interviews after their release, the men described their treatment at Bagram as far worse than at Guantánamo.
...Mr. Dilawar was a frail man, standing only 5 feet 9 inches and weighing 122 pounds. But at Bagram, he was quickly labeled one of the "noncompliant" ones.
....Sergeant Yonushonis described what he had witnessed of the detainee's last interrogation. "I remember being so mad that I had trouble speaking," he said. He also added a detail that had been overlooked in the investigative file. By the time Mr. Dilawar was taken into his final interrogations, he said, "most of us were convinced that the detainee was innocent."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/asia/20abuse.html?pagewanted=6&_r=1
Comments closed March 10, 2008.
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Heads in the Sand
No End in Sight lost out to Taxi. Another good documentary worth checking out.
Posted by afferent input | February 24, 2008 11:34 PM