You Dont Like the Truth 2010

You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo

This documentary is painfully stark yet utterly magnetic, You Don't Like the
Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo presents excerpts from the 2003 interrogation of
the 16-year-old Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen accused of killing an American
soldier during a firefight in an Afghan village.

Working from seven hours of recently declassified tapes, the Montreal-based
filmmakers Luc Cote and Patricio Henriquez have assembled an even-tempered
glimpse behind a very dark curtain. What we see is a blurry, black-streaked
box, the faces of Mr. Khadr's Canadian interrogators hidden behind cartoonish
smudges. This gives them a disturbingly jaunty look as they fiddle with an
asthmatic air-conditioner and proffer cartons of fast food, their fake bonhomie
soon descending into psychological cruelty.

As the teenager, realizing that the Canadians are not there to help him but to
extract evidence for his American prosecutors, arcs from elation through crushing
disappointment, a gallery of observers comments on his predicament. While raising
many more questions than they answer, these voices -- including former cellmates,
lawyers, a psychiatrist and Mr. Khadr's mother and oldest sister -- serve a higher
purpose than simple guilt or innocence. A deeply remorseful former United States
Army interrogator may describe himself as a "monster," but his behavior, we
now suspect, was neither anomalous nor unsanctioned.

Briefly illuminating what one commenter calls the "legal black hole" of Guantanamo
Bay, "You Don't Like the Truth" cleverly employs voyeuristic techniques to unveil
hidden atrocities. In the film's most powerful section, Mr. Khadr (now 25 and
serving an eight-year sentence after a 2010 plea deal) begs for protection and
cries out for his mother while the observers join him on screen, watching his
torment as if they were members of a celestial jury.

What they are really doing, however, is bearing silent witness to the repudiation
of due process and the basic indecency of treating a legal minor as an adult
enemy.