The saga of a Canadian youth held in Guantanamo Bay has taken another twist with the release of an interrogation video shot inside the military prison, Tamam Ahmed Jama reports from Ottawa The video footage, taken in February 2003 and released two weeks ago, shows Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) agents interrogating Omar Khadr inside Guantanamo Bay just six months after his arrival at the notorious military prison in Cuba. Khadr, who was 15 years old when he was taken to Guantanamo Bay, was still recovering from gunshot wounds he sustained at the time of his capture. The video was shot over a number of days and runs for more than seven hours. On day one, Khadr seems to be happy, apparently thinking that the Canadians had come to take him home. On day two, when he realises that that was not their intention, he becomes inconsolable. In one of the most moving moments in the video, Khadr rips off his orange shirt and shows his wounds, saying that he was not receiving any medical treatment. The questioning CSIS agent tells him that his wounds "look like they're healing well." He adds, "I'm not a doctor, but I think you're getting good medical care." Khadr protests through sobs, "No I'm not. You're not here." The agent does not seem to be interested in Khadr's health problems and continues to grill the distressed teenager, hoping to extract information. Sensing this, Khadr breaks down and cries uncontrollably, "You don't care about me." When the agents leave the room, Khadr holds his head in his hands and weeps. The quality of the audio recording is poor, but he says repeatedly what sounds like "help me" or "kill me". The government had insisted for years that it "sought and received" assurances that Khadr was being treated humanely and had resisted requests to turn over the recording. In May, Khadr's lawyers, Nathan Whitling and Dennis Edney, won an injunction from the Canadian Supreme Court to compel the government to disclose the interrogation video as well as other previously classified documents on Khadr's case. Although Khadr was just a boy at the time of his capture, both American and Canadian intelligence services considered him as a "prize captive" because of his father's alleged close ties with Al-Qaeda's elite. Canadian agents visited him in Guantanamo Bay on a number of occasions before Khadr's lawyers obtained a federal court injunction to halt further visits to try to glean intelligence from the captive teenager. A foreign affairs document released a week before the disclosure of the video revealed that Canadian officials knew that Khadr was being subjected to a sleep deprivation regime dubbed by the US military the "frequent flyer programme". The technique -- which involves being moved from cell to cell every three hours, shackled each time -- is considered to be a form of mental torture according to both international law and the US Army Field Manual. An editorial of Canada's leading national daily, The Globe and Mail, the day after the release of the interrogation video, reads: "Government documents have shown that the Foreign Affairs official who accompanied the CSIS agents to observe the interviews was informed ahead of his trip that Mr Khadr had not been permitted to sleep for more than a three-hour stretch for 21 days. One presumes that the CSIS agents knew, too. The CSIS agents decided, wrongly, to question Mr Khadr after he had been subjected to a treatment intended to break him down. The failure to provide him with legal counsel to attend the sessions amounted to a further denial of his fundamental legal rights." Khadr was the only survivor of a raid by US special forces on a suspected Al-Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in July 2002. The Pentagon alleges that he threw a grenade that mortally wounded a US soldier, Christopher Speer, who died of his injuries two weeks after the incident. During the raid, Khadr was shot multiple times at close range and the injuries he sustained left him blind in one eye. He is charged with murder and war crimes and faces life in prison. His trial before the controversial military commissions at Guantanamo Bay is scheduled to begin on 8 October. If it goes ahead, he will become the youngest defendant ever to be tried for war crimes. According to Khadr's American military lawyer, Bill Kuebler, the sole evidence against the Canadian youth is whatever was "tortured out" of a badly wounded, frightened boy. Speaking on Canadian television, Kuebler said he found it "inexplicable" why the Canadian government was allowing its citizen to be tried in a system that just about everybody else believes is a complete sham. "What Omar needs is a fair process," Kuebler said in a separate interview with The Globe and Mail. "That's not Guantanamo." After the release of the video, the opposition parties have called on the government to demand the repatriation of the Toronto-born youth, who is the sole citizen of a Western nation still held at Guantanamo Bay. Bob Rae, former premier of the province of Ontario, of which Toronto and Ottawa are a part, is among the prominent politicians who weighed into the debate after the release of the interrogation video. Rae, who is currently the foreign affairs critic for the opposition Liberals and MP for Toronto Centre, called Khadr "the conscience of Canada", saying that it was unacceptable that the government allow him to languish in Guantanamo Bay and face a military tribunal whose procedures do not meet international standards of fair trial and violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the foundation of US military law. Prominent national and international organisations, including the Canadian Bar Association, UNICEF and Amnesty International had previously urged Canada to request Khadr's repatriation. But Ottawa remains as intransigent as ever -- with Prime Minister Stephen Harper reiterating that the charges against Khadr are serious and saying that the government will not interfere with the "legal" process already underway in Guantanamo Bay. The Military Commissions Act, signed by President George W Bush in 2006, suspended habeas corpus, or justification for detention, of the detainees held at the off-shore prison and stripped them of the right to have their cases heard in regular US courts. In a landmark decision in June, the US Supreme Court ruled that the detainees in Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge the legality of their detention in civilian US courts. "By granting the writ of habeas corpus, the Court recognises a rule of law established hundreds of years ago and essential to American jurisprudence since our nation's founding," said Vincent Warren, executive director of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. "With habeas corpus you never would have had these men -- so many of whom have been cleared of any wrongdoing -- locked up and abused because no court was watching. In those cases, the government will now have to show an impartial judge enough evidence to justify detention. This six-year-long nightmare serves as a lesson in how fragile our constitutional protections truly are in the hands of an overzealous executive."
