The documentary by Alex Gibney, director of "Enron: The Smartest Guy in the Room," will be released in January. The film, which won three Gold Hugo Awards at the Chicago Film Festival and the Best Documentary Award at the Tribeca Film Festival, takes the audience from Bagram to Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo Bay, and investigates the interrogation methods used in the U.S.'s war on terror.

The documentary explores the slippery slope that took the George W. Bush administration from the searing heat of Afghanistan's battlefields to the cold antechambers of torture and homicide in forgotten and lawless corners of the U.S. detention system for suspected terrorists.

Revelations that cruel and inhuman interrogation methods were used at Abu Ghraib in the so-called "global war on terror" have been brushed aside by the Bush administration as the actions of "a few bad apples."

"I think that whole term 'bad apple' is the ultimate cop out," Gibney says. "It seems to me that all of us have, within us, a certain amount of ability to do good and a certain amount of ability to do evil. In war, it's very intense…. It's the reason why we have very stringent rules about how people operate in the field, because you want to have a military unit, not a mob."

However, in the global war on terror, no stringent rules were set by the Bush administration. "There is no question that this story is about the failure of the civilian administration. The civilian administration failed the military…. Honorable military traditions have been transgressed by the civilian leadership."

Guilt that currently rests on individual soldiers such as Lynndie England and Charles Graner, should be distributed upward. "There was a principle in the Nuremberg trials of command responsibility… [yet] no proper investigations have ever been conducted of the people in charge in this policy."

Without stringent rules governing behavior on the battlefield, the heart of darkness prevails. "It's not to excuse what happened by the soldiers, but it is to set it in context."

Gibney stood on the snowy steps of the U.S. Supreme Court as it heard two cases: Boumediene vs. Bush and al-Odah vs. United States of America, both of which argued that the basic right of habeas corpus was violated at Guantanamo Bay.

The detention system at Guantanamo, Gibney says, has "very little regard or understanding for who should be there and who should not be there. We have to remember that 93 percent of the people who are there were captured not by U.S. and coalition forces…. We paid bounty for them. We need to find a very orderly way of re-introducing them to the rule of law."

If the suspected terrorists at Guantanamo are to be given a hearing, the debate remains whether military or civilian law should apply. "My view is that terrorism is a criminal offense. A war on terror is, in my view, fallacious. You can't declare war on a technique."

When asked to define torture, Gibney says, "The definition of torture is purposefully unclear: 'outrages upon human dignity.' It seems to me that once you set a bar which says you cannot inflict cruelty or outrages upon the personal dignity of a prisoner, you [will] hold fast to that conduct…. I do not think it is appropriate or sensible to micro-define torture."

Few would deny that cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques are morally questionable. However, many people would maintain that to successfully fight the ultimate evil of global terrorism, we need to employ techniques that may push the moral envelope.

Gibney disagrees: "I think we have to recapture the high ground. We have to have some sense of high ideals to live up to and not look down to see how fast we can race to the bottom."

"The goal of al-Qaeda and of every terrorist is to provoke liberal democratic societies to undermine their own democratic principles. Well, mission accomplished by al-Qaeda thanks to the Bush administration."

With this film that narrates the death of innocent Dilawar, Gibney hopes to enrage the nation's moral sensibilities so that Americans, "demand that we recapture the moral high ground…. To me, I feel like we're at risk now. Our soldiers are at risk and our civilians, because we have undermined respect for the rule of law."

When asked why this topic interested him, Gibney talked about his father: "My father, who had been an interrogator in the Pacific theater in World War II, was furious about what was going on because he felt he was also, as an interrogator, fighting for the rule of law."

Ultimately, America's war on global terror cannot be fought solely on the battlefields; it must also be fought in the realm of principles. "Rule of law in a democracy is precious, and unless we fight for it, it's going to be taken away."

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"Taxi to the Dark Side" will be released Jan. 11, 2008 by THINKFilm.