All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is Luke Cote.
He is the co-producer and co-director of You Don't Like the Truth.
Four days inside Guantanamo.
Welcome to the show, Luke.
How are you?
I'm quite fine.
And you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us on the show today.
No problem.
My pleasure.
Also, I appreciate you making this movie.
Unbelievable stuff here.
I guess once you go ahead and give us the background of what this video is, how you got it.
And then maybe I know it's difficult, but if you could give us the briefest sketch of the so-called war crimes case against Omar Khadr to set us up for the story here.
OK, well, you know that in 2008, the Supreme Court of Canada released some video that was taken in Guantanamo in 2003 by the Canadian Intelligence Service, CSIS.
And the Omar Khadr's lawyer, it's an interrogation of Omar Khadr, a young Canadian who was caught in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old.
And he's been to he's been caught by the Americans.
He was taken to Bagram and then to Guantanamo.
And by the time he was in Guantanamo, he was 16 years old.
And so some people from the Secret Service went to Guantanamo to interrogate for four days Omar Khadr.
Omar Khadr's lawyer knew that these guys, they went there and they tried for five years.
They fought in every court there is, you know, up to the Supreme Court of Canada to get access to this material, to this interrogation.
And finally, in 2000, in July 2008, they got access to to the material.
And the lawyers, what they did, they edited a little piece, a 10 minute piece of this seven hours and more that they got that they received from the Supreme Court.
They made a little editing of this interrogation and the most of the and mainly the part that is the most, you know, the dramatic where Omar Khadr is crying and asking for his mom.
And we we understand he was 16 years old.
And and so at that point, you know, my co-director, Patricio Enriquez, and I, we saw this piece on the news.
We saw it, you know, on the web because that was posted to everybody to see.
And this these clips, they went around the world.
And at that moment, Patricio and I, we decided that we need to do something with this material because this is unbelievable.
And I have to say, you know, like almost more than three years later, it is still the only footage available out of Guantanamo from inside Guantanamo.
What what's going on there?
Because we know for a fact that all the interrogations and thousands and thousands of them are recorded.
And the only way we got this one is really because they were Canadian Secret Service who went there and they brought back this material because as a transcript, we need to do as a reference.
Because never we would have gotten this material from the Pentagon or from from the Americans.
Impossible.
So it was really because that was Canadian.
And but this material was never supposed to be released.
Never.
And so finally, we we got this material and we decided we started to look at it like everybody else, because a lot of people got it, like I said.
And but we started we started to study the material and we spent a lot of time watching it over and over to realize that we had we have a mine of information here.
And the idea is that what do we do with this now?
How do we put it together?
And so we started to do research and we decided, you know, that we would cut like the best part of the interview, the interrogation.
And the interrogation was over a four day period.
So we took we look at every day and it's a it's a it's a it's a funny thing, because, you know, this war on terror cost billions of dollars to the Americans.
And yet, you know, when they do these interrogation, they use like the cheapest quality camera, you know, like worse than the sound is terrible.
So we had to listen and to watch for many, many, many hours to try to get a transcript of what was being said.
And at the end, you know, we we we thought that we had wonderful, wonderful material and we decided to try to give it a context.
So we approach a lot of people who were in contact with Omar Khadr when he was in Bagram in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo.
And we approach these people so that they can give a context to what we're seeing in the interrogation.
So the main core of the film is really half of the film is the interrogation and the other half, it's people who knew Omar Khadr from ex-self-mate in Bagram and in Guantanamo.
We even have an American soldier who was a torturer in Bagram who is in the film.
We have his lawyers, we have a psychologist, his mother, his sister and all these people can give us an insight of what's going on.
So basically, that's that's the premise of the film and that that's what it is.
And it's really it's such an accomplishment.
And I guess I want to stop right here just to let you tell people how they can buy this thing, because obviously it costs money to make and you need to sell DVDs.
You need people to show up at, I'm sure, the few art house type theaters where it's playing and see this thing.
It's certainly worth the seven bucks or whatever.
So please take this time to plug the movie itself.
Thank you so much.
You know, it's been it's been a great adventure because the film has been going around the world.
We just came back from from Argentina yesterday and the film has been shown in more than 55 festivals around the world.
It was shown at the Film Forum in New York and the other cinemas in the U.S. that are now presenting the film.
So what I suggest to your view or to your to your people is that they can log to our Web site and it's very easy.
It's you don't like the truth dot com.
You don't like the truth dot com altogether.
And then on the Web site, they can see where the film is being screened.
They can see where they can buy it, too, if they want to buy a copy, a DVD copy of it.
So it's it's it's all available there on the Web site.
Well, and it's pretty easy to imagine, isn't it, where that phrase comes from?
You don't like the truth that someone telling the truth, insisting to a military intelligence officer that what's the point?
You keep telling me to talk.
And every time I talk, you tell me I'm a liar.
So what do you want?
Which lie do you want me to tell?
Go ahead.
Give me my line.
I guess I'll repeat it for you if that's what you want.
Exactly.
It really is.
And you mentioned the part where he's crying for his mother.
And I don't think this is just, you know, a child throwing a temper tantrum type of thing.
And this is really the epitome of complete despair and hopelessness here.
You make it very clear kind of with the interviews and the narration and whatever what's going on here, where the first day he's really excited that finally some Canadians have come and maybe they are a lifeline to anything like a path out of his legal black hole that he's in.
Already a body full of shrapnel and haven't been abused in Bagram prison.
And I'm not exactly sure what they did to him in Guantanamo.
I don't know if you can speak to that.
But well, his hopes are very quickly dashed.
And he is at the very edge of despair, maybe over the edge of completely breaking down, where he's, I believe, not just crying out for his mother, but he's crying out to just go ahead and die.
Please let me die.
So now it's a very, very emotional part.
It's the second day where he's really like, you know, he breaks down.
It's the second day, because like you said, the first day is very happy to see Canadians, because you have to remember that all the Western countries at one point, they went to Guantanamo to get their prisoners, to bring them back home, all the Western countries.
And Omar Khadr is the only Western prisoner left in Guantanamo for all this time.
And it's incredible, because all the other ones, they were released in 2003, four or five, they were all gone.
The French, the German, the British and all of them, you know, but Omar Khadr have been stuck in Guantanamo for all these years.
And so, yes, the first day, you know, finally they're here.
I've been waiting for you guys, Canadians, you know, because you really think that they're from the consular affair.
And the thing is, they're very nice to him the first day.
You know, they come and, oh, have you been eating?
You know, we have McDonald's or Subway here.
You want a Coca-Cola?
You know, and they're trying, you know, to be nice with him.
And now tell us a little bit about yourself.
They're just trying to get more intelligent.
All the stuff that you've said in the past to the Americans, you know, to the CIA and to the Pentagon.
And they're just trying to get more of it.
And then I'm sorry, Luke, I'm going to have to cut you off here.
The music's playing.
We got to go out and take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Luke Cote from, I forgot the name of the production company, but it's you don't like the truth dot com.
Four days inside Guantanamo.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
And the movie is called You Don't Like the Truth.
Four days inside Guantanamo.
Luke Cote co-produced it and co-directed it.
It's the story of Omar Khadr, video footage of four days of his interrogation at the hands of Canadian military intelligence at Guantanamo Bay, as well as interviews with his cellmates and various lawyers and experts and family members and everything else.
And it's the story of a kid, a 15 year old kid whose dad supposedly was friends with the bad guys over there in Afghanistan.
And the kid was left in this house with these fighters.
He was supposed to serve as a translator for them for whatever purposes.
And he got caught in a firefight and they accused him quite implausibly.
And maybe we can talk about that a little bit, Luke, of throwing a grenade at a medic, which is a war crime, except that he wasn't doing medicine at the time.
He was a member of the Delta Force with a gun in his hand raiding a house.
And the evidence is quite to the contrary of even the possibility that Omar Khadr had thrown a grenade at this guy in the first place.
But then so they called it a war crime.
They put him in Bagram for, I think, a year and then sent him to Guantanamo Bay.
And now I was hoping, Luke, you could help fill in some of that, particularly his treatment, the threats against his family and the way he was treated at Bagram.
And then again at Guantanamo Bay, this 15 and then 16 year old boy, this victim of circumstance, this child soldier who supposedly protected by 10,000 laws.
Exactly.
And, you know, when he was in Afghanistan, you have to understand that he's been traveling with his family.
He was just accompanying his family, his father, his mother.
You know, his father also, you know, even though they say that he had links with Al-Qaeda, with Bin Laden, he had orphanages, you know, in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And we do this this round of these orphanages and Omar and his family, you know, these brothers and sisters, they would be with their family.
So why when he ended up in that compound where that was bombarded by the by the military, you know, he he was there.
And at the end, you know, he was the sole survivor of this.
But he was even though he was the sole survivor, he was badly injured because he received like two bullet wounds, bullet wounds huge that you can fit a can of beer inside each one of them.
You know, it's you know, that he's still alive.
It's unbelievable.
He should have been dead, you know, because it was right in the chest, you know.
And so he went from from front to back.
It was just open, open wound.
And he had shrapnel all over the place in his eyes.
And today he's blind from one eye and he's losing slowly the other one.
And they say that in that mess, because there were ground troops who were attacking the place and there was also bombarded from the air, you know.
So the place was disseminated totally, totally gone.
And they say that when the these members from the Delta Force arrived there, you know, this guy who's like bleeding on his back and, you know, in with the shrapnel and everything else, supposedly he rose from the rubbles and he threw a grenade that killed Christopher Speer, one of the guy that they refer as a medic because he took a class as a medic.
But he was really there as a Delta, Delta Force.
And everybody has confirmed it.
And we know what is the Delta Force?
The Delta Force is something that even the the American army doesn't acknowledge that that it exists because these guys, they're there to kill.
That's their mission.
And so Omar Khadr was, you know, then he was he they didn't kill him with all these injuries.
You know, they took him on a stretcher.
They brought it to Bagram and he fell.
He fell unconscious in the helicopter carrying him.
And he was unconscious for a week.
Then he woke up in this hospital in Bagram.
And then they started to to to interrogate him because they knew when he arrived and all a lot of ex detainees that we interrogated to interviewed over for this film, some guys from Australia and others from from Great Britain.
They all told us that when they arrived, everybody said, oh, he's the bad guy.
He killed one of ours and he was treated worse than anybody else in Bagram.
He was, in fact, interviewed more than interrogated more than forty nine times by this American soldier.
And I know most likely you've heard of the film, another incredible film called Taxi from the Dark Side.
And the guy who killed this taxi driver in that movie, the American soldier who Joshua Klaus, who killed this taxi driver, who was totally innocent.
He's the same guy who interrogated Omar Carter forty nine times in Bagram.
So he is, you know, is vicious.
He's been torturing people.
And for the death of this guy in Bagram for the taxi driver, he got like six months supposedly.
And no one is sure that he really served in six months of prison.
But for Omar Carter, you know, he was repeatedly tortured, abused at every level.
And I won't go into the details of, you know, all the stuff that went on, because it's the same kind of stuff that you saw with the pictures in Abu Ghraib, you know, with the dogs, with the rape, with all that stuff.
And he was he was in he was in Bagram.
You know, he was arrested in July and he was there until until January when he was moved to when they opened Guantanamo.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I have to follow up on that fact.
I'm not sure, because the way you stated it, whether it's a generalization or specifically you're saying that Omar Carter was raped at Bagram.
No, he was not raped.
You know, he was there was a lot of kind of sexual abuse, naked and that kind of stuff.
He was not raped, but he was threatened to be raped.
I see.
OK, I just wanted to nail that down from the way you said it wasn't quite specific, you know.
But anyway, so please continue.
And then he was so he was really he was really tortured.
And they say and a lot of other prisoners, they say, too, in the hospital where he was, where he was, because he needed a lot of treatment for all the injuries and the wounds that he had in the hospital.
They would purposely, you know, take him from, you know, make him get up and take him by the wound so that to be sure that he was suffering.
And so he went to he went through all that stuff, you know, like, you know, putting stacks of bottles and then to throw them down again and to have him to do it again.
And just physical pain, you know, and on top with all the psychological pain that he went through.
And in Guantanamo, it continued.
It continued.
And he was also part in Guantanamo of the of the famous program, you know, the Frequent Flyer program.
So before interrogation, he would be taken from, you know, they would they would try for three weeks before an interrogation.
They were sleep deprived.
So in his case, you know, every hour they would move him from one cell to another so that to be sure that he never sleeps or, you know, he's always on this on a dreaming state, but never deep sleep.
So and they felt that after three weeks, when the you know, when the interrogator would come, they would they would be much easier.
And and Corsetti tells us, you know, also that this sleep deprivation, this Frequent Flyer program, he said, really worked because these guys, they were hallucinating, you know, for the lack of sleep.
They were like, you know, they would bang their head on the wall.
They were just like getting crazy.
So he was also subjected to that kind of stuff when he was in Guantanamo.
And now I'm trying to remember, wasn't it the case that one interrogator said that when he arrived at Guantanamo Bay, the first thing he saw was Omar Cotter hanging from the wall?
No.
Am I confusing him with another child?
Yeah, I think so, because I didn't hear that from.
OK, do you know about was he abused to Guantanamo Bay?
You know, obviously, you know, that it was we know that he was tortured also in Guantanamo Bay.
And we know that he was part of that Frequent Flyer program.
You know, they were still there at Gitmo.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we know also that at Gitmo that he when he when he participated in the hunger strike that a lot of prisoners did and they were force feeded to and which is very painful experience.
So he was part of that.
And then they had him plead guilty.
Basically, he was facing forever and ever and ever.
And so they made him plead guilty and get what, eight years or something?
Yeah.
What happened is all this time, he always said that he never did it, that he was not guilty, that he never threw this grenade that killed Christopher.
So they made him lie and accept responsibility.
Well, at the end, you know what happened?
It's exactly a year ago, last October.
OK, 2010, you know, they were ready to to have this trial.
And so his lawyers, they went down to Guantanamo.
And you have to understand that when I say trial, it's a joke because it's a military commission.
And a military commission, we all know what it is.
The judge is a soldier.
The jury's on the whole law has been made every century.
We know.
Yeah, it's all OK.
OK, go ahead.
Exactly.
Very quickly.
So from the beginning, the the the lawyer, the Canadian lawyers who represent Omar Carter, what they wanted from the judge is to say, listen, from the beginning, we need to get rid of all this statement that was done that was giving on the torture.
And then the judge decided at that point that, no.
You know, everything he said will be acceptable.
All right.
You guys, you have to see this.
It's called You Don't Like the Truth.
Four days inside Guantanamo.
You don't like the truth dot com.
It's playing in many cities, perhaps yours.
You can order the DVD.
You have to see this.
You have to show it to people.
Thank you so much for your time, Luke.
It's a pleasure.
Thank you very much.
Luke Cote, everybody, co-director and co-producer.
Of You Don't Like the Truth, four days, Guantanamo Bay.
