Omar Khadr shifty, sullen, self-pitying on CSIS interrogation tape
By The Canadian Press - July 15, 2008
by The Canadian Press
EDMONTON — Sitting in his prison-orange shirt under the harsh lights of a Guantanamo Bay bunker, sullen and self-pitying Omar Khadr is by turns the shifty grinning truant teenager and the forlorn victim of a borderless war on terror.
“You didn’t just fall off the turnip truck,” his Canadian interrogator tells him as Khadr sits on a couch, drinking a Coke.
“Right now, Omar, it doesn’t get any worse.”
Tapes of the February 2003 interrogation of the Toronto-born Khadr by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service were released Tuesday following a court order to aid his defence on a charge he murdered U.S soldier Christopher Speer during a firefight in remote Afghanistan in 2002.
The tapes, grainy with poor sound quality, deliver a rare glimpse into the interrogation tactics by Canada’s spy agency.
The camera is hidden behind an air vent, leaving the frame slashed by horizontal slats. His interrogator’s face, for security reasons, is covered by a superimposed black ball, leaving the impression Khadr is being hectored by the petroglyphic stickman off a crosswalk sign.
“Finally,” Khadr smiles on the first day when he learns he is talking to fellow Canucks.
“I’ve been requesting the Canadian government the whole time.”
It had been a long, harsh road to Guantanamo and the CSIS interview.
Government documents, recently unsealed by the courts, reveal that for weeks prior to interrogations, his jailers at the U.S. base in Cuba would soften him up by moving him from cell to cell every three hours on a “frequent flyer” program to deprive him of sleep, making him punchy and more susceptible to questions.
Khadr, now 21, was 15 in July 2002 when he was captured in a firefight with U.S. forces rooting out terrorist strongholds in an Afghanistan village near the Pakistani border.
Sgt. Speer, a 28-year-old medic and father of two from Albuquerque, N.M., was hit by a grenade blast and grievously wounded. Less than two weeks later at a hospital in Germany, they pulled the plug. Khadr was shot twice through the torso in the exchange, shrapnel also grievously damaging his left eye.
He was soon airlifted to Guantanamo Bay and six months later was interviewed while, all around him, the drumbeats of America’s renewed war on terror were beating louder and louder.
Just days earlier, then-U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell made his case to the United Nations why it was time to go after Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction. Around the world, protesters demanded a halt to the pending invasion.
On the Al Jazeera network, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden called for Muslims to continue the fight against America.
It was al-Qaida and bin Laden whom CSIS investigators wanted to know more about from Khadr. His father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was then a vocal supporter and financier for al-Qaida and later died fighting Pakistani forces in the fall of 2003.
No, says Khadr, eating potato chips, picking off crumbs from his shirt and licking his lips, Dad didn’t fund terrorist training camps.
“So everybody’s perceptions of what your father was doing is all kind of a big mistake, is it?” asks the interrogator.
Yes, he nods.
Did Omar go to training camps?
Yes.
For what.
“Self defence.”
Chip. Smack. Finger lick.
“I’m very happy to see you,” smiles Khadr as Day 1 wraps up.
The next day the bonhomie falls off a cliff.
On the tape, Khadr remains behind the desk but now is sullen, morose, unco-operative, crying.
“You don’t care about me!” he blurts out, his face down, covered by his hand.
“Nobody cares about me.”
He pulls his orange shirt over his head and points to his left shoulder.
“I can’t move my arms.
“I requested medical help a long time ago. They wouldn’t do anything about it.”
The interrogator is unfazed.
“I’m not a doctor but I think you’re getting good medical care.”
“I lost my eyes, I lost my feet, everything!” he shouts back.
“No, you still have your eyes and your feet are still at the end of your legs, y’know.”
They leave him alone to compose himself. Instead he sits in the room, head in his hands, fingers clawing at his hair and forehead, sobbing and crying for his mother in Arabic.
By Day 3 he has shifted to a couch, but the mood is improving.
The interrogator softly, forcefully, pushes forward on the father.
“You know what your father wants. Your father wants to continue this struggle. But he’s doing this at the expense of his entire family.”
“He’s not doing anything bad,” says Khadr.
“Well, we think he is.”
On the last day, Khadr is relaxed, back on the couch, eating a reheated burger, sipping a Coke, his arms stretched out on the top of the couch.
He fences with the interrogator, shrugging and smiling as they discuss what he may know about terrorist operations.
Yes, he says, he lied to the Americans and, yes, he has lied to the interrogator. But he had to.
“I said that because I’m scared.”
Of what.
“Of torture.”
He didn’t kill Speer, he says, but instead was sitting down when he was ambushed by three soldiers: “They just came over and shot me,”
“How did that American end up getting so dead then?”
“There was a fight on.”
From there it was over.
“This is our last kick at the cat,” says the interrogator.
Help us out or we’re outta here.
“You just want to hear whatever you want to hear,” says Khadr.
How is he doing in Guantanamo? Getting along? Making friends?
No, says Khadr, head hung again.
“There’s nobody to help me here.”