Politics

You Call This an Interrogation?

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Lawyers for a Guantanamo Bay detainee have released a video of a Canadian military official interrogating their client, 16-year-old Omar Khadr (now 21). Khadr, a Canadian citizen, was 15 when U.S. forces captured him after a firefight in Afghanistan, during which he allegedly killed a U.S. soldier with a grenade. Khadr's interrogation is about as explicit as a Miley Cyrus photo shoot, but it's disgusting nonetheless considering that he probably didn't throw the grenade. It's also important to note that while the video blacks out the faces of Khadr's interrogators, a Toronto Star article reveals that they were the worst of the worst:

Khadr's interrogators included members of a unit implicated in the December 2002 beating deaths of two Afghan detainees, named Dilawar and Habibullah, [Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler] said.

Kuebler showed the judge a photograph of Khadr after his capture, with two gaping exit wounds in his chest from gunshots to his back, and said he would have been particularly vulnerable to coercion when he arrived at Bagram.

I'm starting to wonder if the military wanted this to get out in the hope that viewers would question the legitimacy of reports like this one.

Read the Rolling Stone profile of Omar Khadr here. Al Jazeera International footage below: