Guantánamo film shows plight of Canadian national detained at 15

Filmed interrogation raises ethical questions over treatment of Omar Khadr, arrested in Afghanistan in 2002 and still in custody The footage is shocking: grainy film shows a slim teenage boy, hunched into himself under the spotlight of a bare interrogation cell. “You don’t care about me,” he tells his interrogators, again and again. After they leave, the ceiling-mounted camera records his racking sobs, just audible over the hum of the air-conditioner. At the time of this interrogation in Guantánamo Bay, February 2003, the boy, Omar Khadr, a Canadian national, was barely 16, yet he had already been in military custody for seven months. Now 25, he remains in the US detention centre, though he will soon be transferred to a prison in Canada in deal which led him to plead guilty last year to war crimes . As far as the Pentagon is concerned, Khadr’s case is closed. But a film about his interrogation , released in the UK this week, raises a series of deeply troubling questions. Firstly, it asks, why did the US try a child, captured in Afghanistan aged just 15, when UN treaties decree underage combatants be treated as victims? How reliable was a confession Khadr says was extracted under torture and, it emerged later, tacit threats of gang rape ? The film, You Don’t Like the Truth: Four Days Inside Guantánamo, is released in the UK on Friday. It even casts doubt on the Pentagon’s claims that Khadr was responsible for killing a US solder, the incident for which he was tried. Dennis Edney, a prominent Canadian human rights lawyer who represented Khadr until earlier this year, says he remains dismayed by the attitude of both the US government and that of Canada, which has repeatedly refused to agitate on Khadr’s behalf. “When governments won’t stand up to this prosecution of a child soldier, who will stand up to it?” he said. “If you can’t protect the most vulnerable in society – which are children – then what is it that you do stand for? It says so much about who we are.” Khadr was captured by US forces in July 2002 near the eastern Afghan city of Khost following a fierce battle between US troops and militants into whose care the boy had been placed by his father, Ahmed Khadr, an Egyptian born aid worker who repeatedly shuttled his family between Canada and Afghanistan, where he was an al-Qaida associate and alleged financier. According to US military prosecutors, during the battle a grenade thrown by Khadr fatally injured an American sergeant, Christopher Speer. But photographs which emerged in 2009 appear to show the boy lying unconscious in the bombed-out compound at the time he supposedly committed the act. The boy, then aged 15, was partly blinded and suffered severe back and shoulder injuries in the battle. He was taken first to the Bagram airbase, where interrogation commenced, and then Guantánamo. The four days of questioning by Canadian intelligence officials which features heavily in the film shows a clearly traumatised Khadr initially admitting to having met Osama bin Laden before saying he made this up as he feared more torture. Several times he breaks down in sobs, at one point seemingly calling for his mother. The Pentagon forbids public release of photographs or recordings inside but in 2008 Khadr’s legal team won a US supreme court ruling for disclosure of several hours of footage . Moazzam Begg , a British former Guantánamo detainee who spent time with Khadr during their initial incarceration at Bagram, said the teenager also told him he believed no one cared for his plight. Begg told the film-makers: “That will remain with me forever. The pity that I felt for him, I’ve never felt for anyone that I saw during all the time in Guantánamo and Bagram.” Edney recounted meeting Khadr, then 17, for the first time. “What did I see? I saw a boy chained to a floor in a solitary confinement cell, blind in one eye and still seriously injured. “I could not believe what I was seeing. I’m a very experienced lawyer. Not much shocks me. But if what happens in Guantánamo Bay doesn’t shock you then you’ve got problems.” Khadr’s eventual hearing before one of the controversial military tribunals set up to try Guantánamo prisoners involved his defence portraying him as an impressionable child at the mercy of his father’s wishes. Prosecutors pointed to a video apparently showing Khadr helping make improvised bombs, saying he was mature enough to be responsible for his actions. Khadr had by then agreed to plead guilty in a deal to serve no more than eight years – all Edney will say of that decision is: “Who among us would not have pleaded out to get out of that hellhole?” Now a strapping, bearded man rather than the slim boy of the video, Khadr seems set on seeing the sentence through, even though his confession means he remains a public pariah in Canada. This is despite the repeated insistence of Unicef and the UN’s special representative for child soldiers, Radhika Coomaraswamy, that the only people guilty of war crimes were the adults who coerced a boy into fighting. The US undertook the first war crimes prosecution of a minor since the second world war, Coomaraswamy said . “Child soldiers must be treated primarily as victims and alternative procedures should be in place aimed at rehabilitation or restorative justice.” Guantánamo Bay Canada Moazzam Begg al-Qaida US military Afghanistan Global terrorism United States US foreign policy US national security United Nations US constitution and civil liberties Human rights Peter Walker guardian.co.uk

Posted by on October 5, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.