my film is uh is called
you don't like the truth for days inside guantanamo and it's the story of a four-day interrogation
done by the secret the canadian secret service in guantanamo in february 2003
if if you were bright oh mark i want you to think about this for a few minutes if you're smart
tell me something that can help me that can show my government that you're willing to help us
against a group of people who are bent on doing bad things to us
you're going to lie how do you like i don't want you to lie i just want you to tell the truth
it's all right it's only a truth you're only a truth this is a young kid oma katter he was
cut in a battle in afghanistan and oma katter is a canadian he was 15 at the time and is he was
traveling with his father in afghanistan his father was a kind of a well-known terrorist but he carried
his family with him and oma katter he put him in the house you know in a compound where he was
supposed to do translation for these taliban with whom he was so in july 2002 there was a huge attack
on a compound in afghanistan and he was the sole survivor of this and there was a one american soldier
who died so since then he's been accused of a war crime of killing this this american of course
nothing was proof of that because there were other fighters there but he was arrested even though he
was 15 and he was put in background where he was tortured many many days and then he was moved to
guantanamo we started to work with this and we found very very quickly that the dramatic arc
of the film was exactly these four days you know we didn't need to play with this material
we just needed to cut it down a little bit then we contacted different people it goes from excel
mates from uh with oma katter in afghanistan or in guantanamo we found a couple of the military
american military soldiers who were willing to talk to us is lawyers american military
lawyer is canadian lawyers people mainly who were in contact with oma katter because you
have to understand too that since he's been arrested in july 2002 no one can talk to him
no one can see him he had been put in isolation for years at the time as everyone understood
these detainees were in a legal black hole as the as the english court of appeal had put it
they had no ability to speak with a lawyer they had no right to appear before a court
they couldn't bring a habeas corpus application they hadn't been charged with anything much less
tried for anything and it was it was obvious to everyone who looked at the situation including
the united nations and by then some american courts that this was unlawful there were so
many interesting stories from all these people that we interviewed the struggle was to keep the
focus on the interrogation that that was the real struggle to come back to the interrogation
because sometimes when we were in bagram you know for uh in the film when he's talking about
bagram and we go with the other prisoners who tell of their own experience of bagram and how
they saw oma in bagram we could have we've we could have gotten much longer because it was
fascinating but at the same time we didn't want to lose track of the interrogation because the
interrogation in itself it's so fascinating is there is there anything you want to tell me before
we wrap this up over well in canada more than more than 50 of the people in canada wants him
to write in jail because they're afraid because he's muslim because he has an arabic name and
because his father was a terrorist then he is a terrorist and then he should write in jail
i will never forget his case i will never forget the individual or what happened to him
or how i saw him for me his case epitomizes everything that is wrong in guantanama and the
war on terror a lot of people come out and and the film he said i had such a prejudice against him
before seeing this film and you open my eye you know i see i see him so differently now i see the
situation so differently and i feel embarrassed i feel ashamed
