YOU DON’T LIKE THE TRUTH: 4 DAYS INSIDE GUANTANAMO (Luc Côté, Patricio Henriquez) See listing. Rating: NNNN
Distilled from seven hours of footage of Canadian minor Omar Khadr in U.S. military custody, You Don’t Like The Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo puts a human face on a complex abuse of international authority.
Montreal filmmakers Luc Côté and Patricio Henriquez use Khadr’s 2003 meeting with Canadian interrogators – when the subject was just 16 – to illustrate the impropriety of holding a teenage prisoner as an adult enemy combatant. Split-screen commentary allows various observers to explain the mounting legal and psychological stakes of the interviews.
Khadr’s now-freed cellmates describe his surroundings in miserable detail, and an American interrogation expert essentially admits Khadr was tortured on his watch. It’s a worthy companion to Errol Morris’s shattering Abu Ghraib documentary, Standard Operating Procedure, in that it presents a sickening look at a Kafkaesque holding system designed to intimidate and punish rather than build legal cases and prosecute its charges.