Interrogation Tapes Take Us Inside Gitmo in You Don’t Like the Truth

You Don’t Like the Truth focuses on the pathetic manipulations of Canadian intelligence officers as they interrogate Toronto-born Omar Khadr, the youngest prisoner held in Guantánamo Bay. Recently declassified by the Canadian government, the footage culled from the four-day questioning is the first ever to be released from the detention center; the cruddy images from Gitmo often share a split-screen with Khadr’s former cellmates and torturers, family members, lawyers, psychiatrists, and reporters as they watch the incompetent interviewing and fully flesh out the story of a 15-year-old boy accused of killing a U.S. soldier and captured by American forces in Afghanistan in 2002. “It’s like they’re salesmen whose jobs are on the line,” says Dennis Edney, one of Khadr’s two civilian attorneys, aptly summing up the evil of banality. In a thick Canuck accent, the lead interrogator (obscured, as are all the members of his team, with a black circle over his head), seems qualified only to fiddle with the air-conditioning and obsess over Khadr’s choice of Subway or McDonald’s for lunch when not deploying the most incongruous pop-psych speech (“What you can do is change the future”). These nonsensical bureaucrats provide an adjunct service to a brutal, extralegal U.S. system, one whose preferred methods of questioning have left scars and holes all over Khadr’s body.