Guantanamo’s Child

Guantanamo’s Child: Omar Khadr

The extra layer of tragedy in Omar Khadr’s story is that he was left to rot in Guantanamo long enough that his deprivations don’t count as revelations. By now, he is just another data point in the horrors that have come out of that place, even if he’s an extreme one.

Arriving at the notorious detention centre at 16, he was the youngest prisoner — and last westerner — to be subjected to techniques like “the human mop” — as revealed in Patrick Reed and Michelle Shepherd’s documentary, it involved being forced to pee on the floor and then roll around in it to clean it up.

The details will be familiar to anyone who followed Khadr’s journey: 15- yearold child soldier/Afghan courier to a 29-year-old survivor of torture puttering around a suburban Edmonton home. Guantanamo’s Child makes a good, subtle case that very few of us sought many details on anything that went on in Afghanistan or Cuba.

Reed and Shepherd do a reasonable job of injecting some level of balance into their straightforward retelling. They give time to American soldiers who make no bones about calling him a terrorist and let the likes of Stephen Harper and Vic Toews bluster through press conferences saying the same.

We also get an obviously shaken American interrogator wondering how he or anyone else could have behaved the way he did while effectively torturing a wounded child.

The filmmakers let his family weigh in with opinions that wouldn’t sound entirely out of place coming from Taliban mouths.

Overall, these only serve to drive home how ridiculous the people who opposed his release were: He was a child, and then we tortured him.

As one of the men who spent time with him in prison puts plainly, it’s very hard to claim the moral high ground when you do things like that. ∂∂∂