I've been hearing a lot of buzz about the documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side", which will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival tomorrow. Preview audiences have called it powerful and harrowing, and certainly, the trailer I've linked alone makes my blood run cold.

Executive Producer (and Salon contributer) Sidney Blumenthal discusses how the US has gone From Norman Rockwell to Abu Ghraib:

Through the film runs the story of an Afghan taxi driver, known only as Dilawar, completely innocent of any ties to terrorism, who was tortured to death by interrogators in the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. "Taxi to the Dark Side" traces the evolution of the Bush policy from Bagram (..) to Guantánamo (..) to Abu Ghraib; its roots in sensory deprivation experiments decades ago that guided the CIA in understanding torture; the opposition within the administration from the military and other significant figures (the former general counsel of the Navy, Alberto Mora, and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, explain how that internal debate went, while John Yoo, one of its architects, defends it); the congressional battle to restore the standard of the Geneva Convention that forbids torture (centered on John McCain's tragic compromise); and the sudden popularity of the Fox TV show "24" in translating torture into entertainment by means of repetitious formulations of the bogus ticking-time-bomb scenario.