You Dont Like the Truth: Four Days Inside Guantanamo

Summary

Omar Khadr was taken captive in Pakistan at the age of 15 and ultimately imprisoned at Guantanamo, charged with killing a US soldier.

Khadr was finally transferred into Canadian custody in late 2012. He was held in a maximum security prison and transferred in 2014 to a medium-security one. He was released in 2015.

Reception

Peter Bradshaw, writing in The Guardian, wrote,

"His unseen interrogator here is a Canadian intelligence officer, evidently the lead officer in a team, permitted by the Americans to question the prisoner on the understanding that a friendly seeming fellow countryman might cause Khadr to open up and give the US valuable intelligence. So far from being a respite from torture, this insincere friendly chat is a hideous refinement of cruelty: a horrifying turn of the screw."

According to Andrew O'Hehir, writing in Salon, "Khadr became a sort of ritual sacrifice by the Canadian government, an offering to its American allies and/or overlords."

Sam Kressner, writing in Filmcritic.com, wrote that:

"The question posed in You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo is not that of Omar's innocence. We will never know what truly happened. Rather, the crux of the film lies in the legal "black-hole" that Guantanamo detainees find themselves in. Is it possible to hold a man, let alone a child, accountable to the status of Prison of War, illegal under United Nations law since the days of the Nuremberg Trials?"

Awards

The film won the Special Jury Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.

The film won an award for "best documentary about society" at the Prix Gémeaux on September 13, 2011.

The film was nominated in the best documentary category for the 2010 Genie awards. According to a September 27, 2011 review in the Film Journal, the film did not yet have a distributor in the United States, but was eligible for an Oscar nomination opening in New York City in September 2011. It did not receive a nomination.

Politics

Shortly before the film's premiere, Canada lost its bid for one of the rotating seats on the United Nations Security Council. According to Rhéal Séguin, writing in The Globe and Mail, the filmmakers "are convinced one reason Canada failed to get a seat on the United Nations Security Council was because the federal government has been condemned by many countries for failing to respect Mr. Khadr's human rights and the provisions of the international convention on child soldiers."