Dreaming of Simplicity

He looks like a child; crying, begging for help, but he receives no sympathy or comfort from the strangers sat opposite him. Beyond the grainy, low quality video that only reveals a pale faced man in an orange jump suit; he is a child. He is a boy of only sixteen, yet the strangers have not come to help him, instead they are there to exploit the trust and desperation of this young man. The strangers joke about his wounds, "I'm not a doctor, but you look like you're getting good medical care," he soon realises that they are not there to help him. The strangers are his own countrymen, and this sixteen year-old boy who has been subjected to weeks of sleep deprivation is a Canadian citizen.

Six years after he was first detained, videos of Omar Khadr being interrogated by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) in Guantanamo have been released. They are the first videos of a Gitmo interrogation to ever be released. In the words of a Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) official, he is very simply a "screwed up young man".

In a liberal democracy, where humanity unites society, we would expect a vulnerable teenager who has been driven to terrorism by his family and his background to be given help. We would expect rehabilitation to be the most pressing concern as with any other young offender. Instead, Omar was shipped of to Gitmo where, at the very least, he was deprived of sleep for days on end, his lawyers aledge more.

The US illegally detained and are rumoured to have tortured him, the CSIS cooperated, and aided his captors at Gitmo instead of fighting for the rights of one of their own citizens. This is revealed on the same day that the Guardian's front page alleges that MI-5 (British internal intelligence) and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, commonly known as MI-6, British external intelligence) colluded with the Inter-Service Intelligence (Pakistani intelligence service) to have British terrorist suspects, British citizens among them tortured in Pakistan. Welcome to the West, liberty for all, unless our governments decide otherwise.

One of my favourite bloggers is a survivor of the 7/7 London terrorist attacks. She opposed the new 42-day British detention law, her argument was that we can never be truly safe, so why destroy the civil liberties that we have fought so hard for in trying.

Omar puts his head in his arms, begins pulling at his hair, "KILL ME! KILL ME! KILL ME!" he sobs. Six years later his story makes only fourth bill on BBC News after a kidnap suspect winning libel, the trial of a man who faked his own death, and rising inflation. Something is very wrong when we have lost the ability to be shocked by the illegal detention and 'soft' torture of a sixteen year-old boy, for six years by the most powerful and supposedly moral country in the world.

Al-Qaeda doesn't make terrorists, the CIA does.