We are all responsible for Omar Khadr
A Review of the documentary You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo
“Knowing has everything to do with growing. But the knowing of dominant minorities absolutely must not prohibit, most not asphyxiate, must not castrate the growing of the immense dominated majorities.” Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers.
A teenager with light brown skin, short hair and clad in orange coveralls sits slumped at a desk, head held in delicately cupped hands, and sobs. As he cries for his mother in Arabic the grainy image flickers and jerks with a lo-fi intensity that befits surveillance footage. He is alone in the room, having been left by his CSIS and CIA interrogators, fuliginous nameless wraiths who are off camera watching the same footage themselves, waiting for an opportune time to return to the tiny room to continue the psychological warfare they have been conducting on this twice shot, blinded from shrapnel, tortured and imprisoned adolescent.
And we—the audience—are watching with them, sitting tense in our seats, experiencing the intimate proximity of an interior space of intense injustice, pain, suffering, and desperation.
The teenager is Omar Khadr, a prisoner of the US government, who has been incarcerated for nearly seven years in Guantanamo Bay – where the surveillance footage was captured. The video of his four-day interrogation was recently released (some of it censored by authorities) and has been deftly deployed by filmmakers Luc Côté and Patricio Henriquez in a new documentary You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo.
The minimalist film relies exclusively on the surveillance footage and interviews with Khadr’s lawyers, former co-inmates, family and experts. Inventively shaped into the documentary form, these interior scenes—difficult to watch, infuriating, heart-wrenching sequences of oppression and abuse—epitomize a dynamic documentary cinema powerfully delivers: that of virtual proximity.
Image from the Face Book Group, Justice for Omar Khadr
Documentary cinema is a powerful tool for drawing out empathy and understanding when it creates these spaces of interiority – intensely personal spaces that defy laws of physicality, where distance shrinks between subjectivities and audiences feel so close, so connected to the scenes before them the exchange elicits discomfort and tension. It is a virtual proximity that is championed by the non-fiction film genre; a screen closeness that lends itself to deep, emotional, and critical elucidation.
Following the Khadr example, one can learn about this terrible black mark on international law and on Canadian conscience by reading articles and watching news segments. One can even access some of the above mentioned surveillance footage on line. But these resources—disparate and disjointed fragments of “objective” interpretations of social reality—are ephemeral and incomplete stations along a journey of discovery and inquiry, they do not provide the holistic, attentive and ultimately intimate space that a documentary film deliver.
As such, it is documentary that shakes us from our media-sampling meanderings, sits us down, and teaches us how to come closer to others not near to us – how to diminish distance and share experience virtually with those we are likely never to come into material contact with, from the marginalized to the oppressed, the monsters and the casualties. It is this shared space documentary produces, this element of collapsing distant realities in time and space, that sets the grounds for diverse and dynamic spaces of discovery and inquiry, and hopefully inspired action.
And I certainly hope You Don’t Like the Truth (the title is taken from a comment an exasperated Khadr made to interrogators), will do just that for every single Canadian alive. This is wishful thinking of course, and a seemingly bizarre sentiment considering it is born out of engagement with a film that offers no hope at all for the victim of one of Canada’s most violent and discriminatory policies ever deployed. Omar Khadr is a sad burnt offering of Canada’s “War on Terror,” having been in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong colour skin. There is no evidence against him that, even the American soldiers interviewed in the film agree, prove that he is guilty of killing a US soldier. In fact there is evidence that proves the opposite. Besides, as lawyers in the film argue, he was fifteen when he supposedly (I would say fictitiously) threw the deadly grenade – which makes him a “child soldier” under UN conventions and international law, meaning he should be released from Guantanamo immediately.
But freedom is a fairytale for this terrorized Canadian citizen. Instead, his lawyer, Dennis Edney, told us in Montreal after the screening at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema, he has two choices: Plead guilty and spend the rest of his life in prison, hopefully in Canada, or fight for his innocence and continue wasting away in the sinister shadows of Guantanamo and other US torture chambers. He is moving toward the former with little hope for a future of walking among the free.
As Omar Khadr fades from the collective conscience, from our media-memory fragments, this new documentary confronts us and urges us to share his space, to feel his suffering, and to be inspired to fight for him.“Each one of us is powerful. We can’t sit around and wait for government to do the right thing. We have to do it ourselves.” Edney told us this in an impromptu speech later in the evening that was will emerge as the most memorable and moving speech of the festival. Yet, it was a speech also mired by defeat: “I’m going to fly to Guantanamo tomorrow to see Omar and I’ll tell him about tonight and all of you, but I’m afraid I’ve got nothing hopeful to offer you.” The defeat is certainly not Edney’s, who has spent thousands of his own money and countless volunteer hours to represent Khadr over the years, but is instead shared by every Canadian.
We are all responsible for Omar Khadr’s freedom and rights. We are also all responsible for the abuses he has suffered during incarceration, including those against his rights. As he fades from the collective conscience, from our media-memory fragments, this new documentary confronts us and urges us to share his space, to feel his suffering, and to be inspired to fight for him.
The intense anger that many felt leaving the theatre must be translated into action. We must not forget about Khadr and other victims of Canada’s racist and costly War on Terror. We must fight for what is right, and what is right concerning Omar Khadr will never feel so clear as it does after experiencing You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo.
The time of waiting for government, especially the Harper administration, is over. It is time to force the elite minority of decision-makers and policy-shapers to do the right thing. There are only a handful of Khadr’s compared to the multitudes who enjoy the privileges of freedom in this country, it is enough to turn empathy into actions. It is enough to turn knowing about injustice and oppression into growing as active citizens who share the space of the dominated and who fight to break free of that space.
To take action, visit the Amnesty International Campaign page for Omar Khadr or the Omar Khadr Project, including the petition to repatriate Omar Khadr.
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Omar Khadr’s Canadian Lawyer: ‘The Americans Have Made Up The New Rules In The Laws Of War’
Yesterday, 24-year-old Canadian citizen Omar Khadrpleaded guilty to terrorism related charges during his military tribunal hearing at Guantanamo Bay. Khadr admitted to throwing a grenade on an Afghanistan battlefield that killed an American soldier in 2002 and planting numerous roadside bombs. Khadr had been reluctant to admit guilt, but his Canadian lawyer, speaking wit the CBC’s As It Happens last night,explained the situation Khadr faced:
DENNIS EDNY: He’s agreed to accept this deal because when he looks at the alternatives and the alternatives are that he’s in a military process…that has been condemned by military prosecutors themselves who say that it is designed to make findings of guilt. He faced the potential of life in prison under this system here because the jury is hand picked, the judge is hand picked, the prosecution is hand picked and the military defense is hand picked. And then what I think really capped it all off was, much of the evidence against Omar are statements that he made while being abused and tortured and under duress. So the cards were stacked.
Indeed, Khadr was both mentally and physically abused at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, where he was first interrogated, and at Gitmo. Those statements he made under duress were deemed admissible in court. Moreover, the New York Times notes that Khadr’s prosecution was “unusual” not only because child soldiers are normally not prosecuted (Khadr was 15 years old when the U.S. military apprehended him), but also because the main charge against him was killing a soldier on the battlefield, an action, again, that is not traditionally prosecuted. Thus, the U.S. military took great pains (see the “Jurisdiction” section of Khadr’s Stipulation of Fact) to make the case that Khadr lacked military immunity. One reason the military cited was the fact that Khadr wore no national military uniform. The Times reports the Obama administration’s shocking reaction to this conundrum:
The uniform issue also led to a scramble by the Obama legal team to rewrite commission rules on the eve of a hearing for Mr. Khadr. Because Central Intelligence Agency drone operators also kill while not wearing uniforms, the team rewrote the rules to downgrade “murder in violation of the laws of war” to a domestic law offense from a war crime to avoid seeming to implicitly concede that the C.I.A. is committing war crimes.
During his CBC interview, Edny further explained the bizarre circumstances surrounding Khadr’s plea:
EDNY: In court today, they added two more charges that we’d never heard of and it seems to be that he is responsible for everybody that got injured or killed in that fight in the compound with the Taliban. [...] These charges that Omar faces are unknown under the laws of war. The Americans made them up in order to justify detaining people who didn’t wear a uniform in the battlefields of Afghanistan and I’ve often said over the years, can someone tell me what uniform the Northern Alliance was wearing when it joined the Americans in attacking the Taliban? So it’s all smoke and mirrors here.
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Omar Khadr's Canadian lawyer talks to CBC's As It Happens
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Under the terms of the agreement, Khadr will serve one more year in detention in Guantanamo Bay and then be repatriated to Canada to serve the remaining seven years.
A number of legal scholars questioned the legitimacy of Khadr’s proceedings. “The conviction of this child soldier for non-existent war crimes is a disgraceful travesty and a stain on America’s reputation,” said former Gitmo defense lawyer David Frakt, who added that the plea “saved the administration from the unseemly spectacle of a trial” and that the U.S. will “still go down in history as the first civilised nation to prosecute a child soldier as a war criminal.” Stanford Law lecturer Chip Pitts said, “This plea bargain shouldn’t be taken as indication of the legitimacy of the irredeemably tainted military commissions.”
“I don’t know how anyone who cares about the integrity and moral standing of the United States can absorb the full details of this case and not be profoundly ashamed,” writes the Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan. “To prosecute a child soldier, already nearly killed in battle, tortured and abused in custody, and to imprison him for this length of time and even now, convict him of charges for which there is next to no proof but his own coerced confessions…well, words fail.”