"Screwed Up" and "Abused": The Interrogation of 16-Year-Old Omar Khadr

By Andy Worthington, Andy Worthington's Blog. Posted July 16, 2008.

As the Abu Ghraib scandal demonstrates, a photo is worth a thousand words -- even if, as Errol Morris' newly-released documentary Standard Operating Procedure demonstrates, those words are sometimes what the viewer wishes to see, rather than what actually happened.

There is, therefore, enormous excitement in the media about the first ever release of images from interrogations in Guantánamo: seven and a half hours of footage (highlights available here in a ten-minute version) from interrogations of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight with U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in July 2002.

In February 2003, when he was still only 16, Omar was visited by representatives of his home country's Air Force Office of Special Investigations. As has already been widely reported, the video footage from these interrogations -- released to Omar's Canadian lawyers, Nathan Whitling and Dennis Edney, as the result of a decision in May by the Supreme Court of Canada and a decision in June by the Federal Court of Canada -- shows Omar displaying his wounds, weeping uncontrollably and pulling at his hair in despair.

Despite the excitement, however, documents relating to these interrogations have been available for the last six days, and it's my belief that they demonstrate the confusion of a desperately lonely imprisoned child without any of the dubious voyeurism that the images bring, whilst also allowing a useful distance from which to appreciate the general coldness and indifference of the interrogators. As Whitling noted in an email accompanying the documents' release, "The documents paint a picture of a victimized and exploited boy."

The Canadian representatives interrogated Omar for four days, and in three separate documents relating to the sessions they ran through the lines of questioning they pursued, which were mainly to do with his family history and his knowledge of al-Qaeda. Omar's father, who funded orphanages in Afghanistan, was also friendly with Osama bin Laden, and Omar and his three brothers spent much of their childhood in Afghanistan and Pakistan, on occasion sharing a compound with the bin Laden family.

Absent from these reports, however, is any detailed questioning relating to Omar's supposed crime -- the killing of a US soldier during the firefight in which he was captured, the veracity of which has only recently been exposed to scrutiny. Also missing are the odd flashes of humanity that can be gleaned from the videotape, when, for example, one of the interrogators attempts to calm Omar, who is clearly distraught, by saying, "I know this is stressful."

These human touches are, however, overshadowed by the interrogators' general indifference to Omar's plight. As Whitling and Edney noted when they released the documents, although Omar was clearly "suffering from severe emotional problems connected with his detention and interrogation, crying heavily on more than one occasion," the Canadian officials "dismissed his claims of abuse on the flimsiest of pretexts," writing, in one of the reports, that his allegations of torture at the US prison in Bagram, Afghanistan, which have, of course, subsequently been verified by numerous sources, "did not ring true."

The interrogators were also indifferent when Omar broke down after describing how he was severely wounded in one eye during the firefight that led to his capture. One report relates, "Khadr stated, 'I lost my eyes,' indicating that when he was shot, it affected his vision. Khadr put his head back in his hands and cried heavily. The interrogators left him at this point." On another occasion, another report states, "Khadr has not received any letters from family since being detained. The interviewers then provided Khadr with a letter, which had recently arrived at Camp Delta. The letter was from his grandmother in Canada. Khadr was left along to review the letter. Khadr was watched using a video monitor and a one-way piece of glass. Khadr appeared to cry while reading the letter. Tears were coming from his eyes and he was rubbing his eyes and nose."

This might not be quite so worrying if Omar was an adult at the time of his capture and interrogations -- although it would still raise uncomfortable questions about Canadian complicity in the U.S. detention of a Canadian citizen in worryingly novel circumstances, held neither as a Prisoner of War protected by the Geneva Conventions, nor as a criminal suspect facing a regular trial.

Given Omar's circumstances, however, it directly contravenes the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which both the United States and Canada are signatories, which stipulates that juvenile prisoners -- defined as those accused of a crime that took place when they were under 18 years of age -- "require special protection." The Optional Protocol specifically recognizes "the special needs of those children who are particularly vulnerable to recruitment or use in hostilities", and requires its signatories to promote "the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict."

See more stories tagged with: torture, cia, war on terror, u.s. military, interrogations, afghanistan, canada, guantánamo, omar khadr

Andy Worthington is a writer and historian, and author of The Guantánamo Files.

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