An image from video of the February 2003 CSIS interrogation of Omar Khadr, six months after he was captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan at age 15.

CTV.ca

When a pair of federal intelligence agents visited Guantanamo Bay seven years ago, they met Omar Khadr in a small neon-lit interrogation room and said, “I guess we’re the first Canadians you’ve seen in a while.”

“Canadians? Yeah, finally!” replied Khadr, who had been captured and detained by U.S. troops six months earlier, at the age of 15.

One of the interrogators then offered the teenager a Subway sandwich and a Coke, and asked Khadr to describe his life beginning with his earliest memory.

So begins “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo,” a documentary film built around seven hours of grainy surveillance footage depicting Khadr’s February 2003 interrogation by a Canadian Security Intelligence Service agent and another federal intelligence official.

The Supreme Court ordered the video released to Khadr’s lawyers in 2008, but the public has only seen about 10 minutes of the footage until now.

In the full video, the interrogations begin cordially but take an unfriendly turn after Khadr apparently realizes the Canadians have come to gather information rather than help repatriate him. At one point Khadr breaks down in sobs, saying “nobody cares about me.”

The next day, interrogators continue pressing their subject about everything from his relationship with his father, to what he knows about Osama bin Laden, to how he wound up in an Afghan compound on July 27, 2002, as Taliban-linked militants fought to the death against American troops.

“I didn’t do anything,” Khadr says of the battle, in which he was badly injured. “I was in the house when the fighting started, then I didn’t have any choice.”

The U.S. government has accused Khadr of killing an American medic named Sgt. Christopher Speer by throwing a grenade in that firefight, and of supporting terrorism.

Khadr’s lawyers argue that their client’s father, a suspected al Qaeda financier who had ties to bin Laden, indoctrinated his son to take up violent jihad.

‘Bigger picture’

The 99-minute documentary paints a sympathetic portrait of Khadr as a child soldier who has lived in a legal black hole, and has allegedly endured torture by U.S. authorities since his capture in the Afghan mountains eight years ago.

Khadr, now 24, remains the youngest inmate at Guantanamo Bay and the last Western citizen imprisoned there. He is also the first to face trial by U.S. military tribunal since President Barack Obama was elected — and the first person in more than half a century to face war crimes charges for alleged acts committed as a juvenile.

As such, his saga has received ample media attention. But Canadian filmmakers Luc Cote and Patricio Henriquez wanted to pull together different aspects of Khadr’s case in the hopes of generating awareness about what they call a miscarriage of justice.

“Everybody knows a little bit of information here and there,” Cote said in a phone interview. “But when you look at it all together and you have the bigger picture, I think you understand a little bit better what’s going on.”

“We’re just trying to say, ‘Open your mind, open your heart to another point of view and perhaps you’ll learn something here.’”

To do that the film presents evidence, including a photograph of Khadr immediately after the 2002 firefight, which suggests he may have been too badly injured to lob the grenade that killed Speer.

It also scrutinizes international law regarding the case, noting that Canada has ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, under whose terms Khadr would be designated a child soldier because of his age when the gunfight occurred.

Several unexpected characters plead for Khadr’s repatriation to Canada in the film. They include a retired psychiatrist with the U.S. military who assessed Khadr at Guantanamo, and a former American interrogator named Damien Corsetti who was stationed at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan while Khadr was held there.

Former detainees also make appearances, such as Moazzam Begg, who met Khadr while he was imprisoned at Bagram.

“He’s spent his entire adolescence in Guantanamo and clearly knows nothing other than that,” Begg, who now works for a human rights group in Britain, said by phone. “That’s a big stain on the United States of America, but an even bigger one on Canada.”

Political reaction

The film premiered in Montreal earlier this month, and got a strong reaction Wednesday on Parliament Hill when it was screened for MPs from the Bloc Quebecois, the Liberal party and the NDP.

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe said the federal government “should be ashamed” for not requesting Khadr’s repatriation, while New Democrat MP Wayne Marsten called Ottawa’s treatment of Khadr “appalling.”

“This is one of the most shameful events that we’ve had in this country,” Marsten said later in an interview with CTV.ca. “The government should have been shouting from the rooftops to end this.”

The film will premiere in Toronto this week and will debut internationally next month at the world’s largest documentary film festival in Amsterdam. Amnesty International also hopes to hold screenings as far away as Hong Kong.

But the documentary’s most important audience may take in the film at Guantanamo.

According to reports, Khadr could accept a plea deal with the Pentagon as early as Monday, which would see him serve a year in a U.S. prison and seven more in Canada.

Regardless of whether a deal is struck, his lawyers say they intend to play “You Don’t Like the Truth” at trial or during his sentencing.

They have also shown Khadr the film twice. He was “initially sad at revisiting the painful experience,” Dennis Edney, one of his Canadian lawyers, wrote in an email.

Edney played the film for Khadr a second time this week and wrote that, “he was pleased to hear that people cared for him.”

http://www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20101023/omar-khadr-documentary-101024/

Saudi Arabia's Assistant Minister of Defense and Aviation arrives at the Pentagon for talks on Yemen, Nov. 17, 2009. (DoD / R. D. Ward)

CTV.ca

It’s a pattern that governments fighting Islamic extremism don’t want to see repeated — success cracking down on militants in one country boosts terrorism elsewhere.

In Afghanistan, for example, the U.S. invasion prompted al Qaeda’s leadership to seek shelter in the tribal areas of Pakistan, beyond the reach of the central government in Islamabad.

Similarly, experts say al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, the group that claimed responsibility for the attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound flight on Dec. 25, was formed in Yemen partly because of Saudi Arabia’s success at abolishing militant groups next door.

Saudi authorities have been waging a campaign to rehabilitate, imprison or kill suspected extremists since a wave of terrorist attacks wracked the country in 2003 and 2004. But some militants fled south to Yemen, where AQAP was created last January.

“There was a balloon effect,” said Letta Tayler, a terrorism and counterterrorism researcher with Human Rights Watch. “It’s a much more hospitable environment for al Qaeda than Saudi Arabia was following the crackdown.”

The American military had been helping Yemen combat al Qaeda before Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian who had taken Arabic classes in Yemen, allegedly tried to detonate a bomb on board Flight 253.

Earlier in December, the U.S. military assisted with two air strikes on Yemeni territory. They were reportedly aimed at suspected al Qaeda leaders and killed several dozen civilians. The second strike took place a day before Abdulmutallab boarded a flight to Detroit.

The U.S. also provided nearly US$70 million in military aid to Yemen in 2009. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, has said the Department of Defense will double that amount this year.

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that his government, along with the U.S., will help Yemen fund a new counterterorrism force.

Later this month, the British capital will also host two simultaneous international conferences, one on Afghanistan and the other on Yemen.

Tayler said that countries seeking to combat radicalization in Yemen would do well to learn from U.S. General Stanley McChrystal, NATO’s top commander in Afghanistan.

To defeat the Taliban and keep al Qaeda from returning to Kabul, McChrystal has recommended that U.S. troops use “courageous restraint.”

“At the end of the day, the success of this operation will be determined in the minds of the Afghan people,” McChrystal said last month. “It’s not the number of people you kill. It’s the number of people you convince. It’s the number of people that don’t get killed. It’s the number of houses that aren’t destroyed.”

As with Afghanistan, experts say there’s no easy solution to countering al Qaeda in Yemen.

Joost Hiltermann, deputy program director with International Crisis Group’s Middle East and North Africa arm, warned that military intervention could weaken the central government, allowing al Qaeda more free rein there.

“In a situation as fragile as in Yemen, to put a major external military force could be fatal,” Hiltermann told CTV.ca. “The country may not be able to sustain it.”

Complex problems

Yemen is a semi-mountainous country on the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula with a fast-growing population of some 22 million people.

One of the least developed countries outside sub-Saharan Africa, the UN Human Development Index estimates that 35 per cent of Yemenis live in poverty. Malnourishment is a common affliction for children and nearly half the population is illiterate.

Oil, which brings in three-quarters of the national income, is running out. Tourism was touted as a possible alternative revenue generator (Yemen houses four UNESCO heritage sites). But visitor numbers have dropped due to attacks on foreigners, and political instability.

About 150,000 people have been displaced by a civil war that has been raging intermittently near Saada, in the north of the country, since 2004. The Yemeni government has been accused of indiscriminate bombing in the conflict, which Hiltermann says “is clearly escalating.”

In the south, a secessionist movement flared up last spring, bringing hundreds of thousands of protesters into the streets.

A female Yemeni SWAT team on a training exercise. (BBC World Service)

“The bottom line is, the country’s in chaos,” Tayler said. “There are no prospects for youth and most citizens are concerned about how to get the next meal.”

As Yemen’s troubles mount, President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s government is losing more control. His reach, which doesn’t extend to many parts of the country, is weakening further.

Marisa L. Porges, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who advises on counterterrorism for the U.S. Department of Defense, travelled to Yemen in the fall.

“There are so many domestic problems that al Qaeda isn’t a top priority,” Porges said by phone from Washington.

“In private conversations, many officials say ‘we’re already there — the state has failed.’” she added. “This is the pervading sense now.”

Confronting al Qaeda

AQAP launched several attacks last year, including an attempt to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism chief, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, and two attacks against South Korean tourists and dignitaries — all using suicide bombers.

But the attempted Dec. 25 airliner attack seems to represent the group’s first plot against a target outside the region.

While that incident focused the international community’s attention on AQAP, experts say it will be hard if not impossible to keep such groups off Yemeni territory without addressing the country’s other problems.

Jane Novak, an American analyst and expert on Yemen, warned that President Saleh may simply use military aid from the U.S. to oppress his opponents, while the country goes down.

“It’s such a complex situation,” she said. “It’s very difficult in Yemen to find anyone there to work with.”

Convincing Saleh, who has ruled the country for three decades, to implement political reforms could help make the country less hospitable for terrorist groups by boosting loyalty to the government, Novak said.

“Basically in Yemen they consider (the Saleh regime) a tyranny, and an incompetent one as well,” she said. “To reduce the instability, the ungoverned regions, they need to somehow force power-sharing and the respect for civil rights.”

Tayler echoed that view, saying policies that reduce oppression and boost faith in the government are needed to fight al Qaeda there effectively.

“You need a holistic approach,” Tayler said. “Otherwise, the counterterrorism policy will simply backfire — whether it’s Pakistan, whether it’s Yemen, whether it’s Afghanistan.”