Scheer interviews filmmaker Alex Gibney about his new documentary Taxi to the Dark Side (see the trailer here) This is what we turn our kids into when we send them to war.

One sergeant told one of these kids “take that prisoner out of his comfort zone…” meaning beat him up. And in retrospect they’re deeply haunted by what they have seen and what they did. As one very big, burly guard said, “I wish I had done stuff according to my own morality instead of what was common.”

Scheer: But these are kids who’ve never been out of the country before? Some may have found themselves…

Gibney: A lot of them were National Guard and suddenly they’re in a foreign country, where bullets are flying and your buddies are dying. It’s natural…

Scheer: Now this taxi driver, he was totally innocent?

Gibney: That’s one of the things of this story that have always haunted me. There are two things will always haunt me. One is, this kid, he’s a 122 pound kid, he was 22 years old, I believe. He was driving home in his taxi and was picked up by Afghan militia, turned over to American forces. He was told to the Americans that he was responsible for a rocket attack. It turned out that that the people who turned him over were the ones who launched the rocket attack. The Americans didn’t know it. They tortured him so badly that, they beat him so badly, that ultimately he died of his injures after five days. On the third day though they discovered he was innocent, and for another two days they tormented him until he died. They literally kicked his legs so often that they became pulpified.

Scheer: Even though they knew he was innocent?

Read the whole interview here