On Friday 22 January 2016, a panel joined a packed audience at the Frontline Club for a lively discussion following the London premiere screening of Michelle Shephard‘s Guantanamo’s Child. With unprecedented access to former fellow prisoners, family members and government officials, the documentary explores the political and ethical implications of the harrowing case of Omar Khadr.

Richard Gizbert, presenter of The Listening Post on Al Jazeera English, moderated the discussion. The panel was comprised of investigative reporter and filmmaker, Michelle Shephard; former Guantanamo Bay prisoner and director of outreach at CAGE, Moazzam Begg; and Cori Crider, head of the Abuses in Counter-Terrorism team at Reprieve.

“All the best work that comes out of Guantanamo either has her name or Karen Rosenberg’s on it,” Gizbert began, praising Shephard‘s substantial journalistic achievements in investigating Camp Gitmo over the past decade.

Still buzzing from tonight’s event at @frontlineclub – the film and discussion after were brilliant #mustseefilm pic.twitter.com/lItRso6GXE

— Camilla Pallesen (@CMPallesen) January 22, 2016

Shephard began by elaborating on her experiences and knowledge of Guantanamo Bay, broadly explaining why certain people were imprisoned and others were not. “What decided how you were dealt with and when you were released from Guantanamo was not the merits or demerits of your case, but what passport you held (…) Guantanamo was never created as a place to try for war crimes. It was created as an intelligence gathering unit.”

Gizbert then asked Begg if the film fell short of capturing the difficult times experienced during his imprisonment. He responded: “There is a part of the story you will never get to see. For example, the conversations I had with my lawyer while at Guantanamo were classified. When I left, I asked for the notes of these meetings and they told me I can’t have them because they are classified.”

Referring to the strict rules that journalists experience when covering Guantanamo, Begg continued: “When you can’t film a person’s face, when you can’t show what he looks like, what his expressions are, and how he feels, it takes away from the humanity of the situation.”

Crider picked up on this point and expressed her respect for lawyer Dennis Edney. He features heavily in the documentary as Khadr’s lawyer, and his role in exposing Khadr’s story has been an essential one. “So much of what the Guantanamo lawyer has to do isn’t traditional legal work in any event. They have to get these stories past the censors and into the world to convey these peoples’ humanity. I think for a solo practitioner to do something like this for Omar is absolutely extraordinary.”

Gizbert asked how important it was that a wide range of characters – such as the interrogators and military lawyer – were included in the telling and depiction of the story.

Shephard responded: “It was really essential to get all voices in [the documentary]. Omar Khadr was seen as a murderer and rapist on the extreme right, and Nelson Mandela on the extreme left. He thought he was neither. So we really wanted to break down that character, but not do it in an activist way. We wanted to get the most complete picture possible.”

Indeed, the panellists agreed that the fields of human rights and counter-terrorism are never “black and white.” This ambiguity was highlighted by Begg, who concluded the discussion with a comment on his former interrogators and prison guards at Guantanamo: “I have 15 of them on Facebook, as friends.”

For information on future screenings, please click here.

Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was captured by American forces in Afghanistan in 2002 and spent a decade imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, tells his own story in this documentary portrait from directors Patrick Reed and Michelle Shephard.

In prison Khadr struggled to endure the inhumane conditions and the demoralising improbability of release. In the outside world, public outcry mounted as the US and Canadian governments refused to take action. It took the relentless work of Dennis Edney, Khadr’s lawyer of over a decade, to advance the case. Finally repatriated to Canada in 2012, and released in May of this year, Khadr then faces the Harper government’s attempt to overturn his bail.

Featuring unprecedented access to former fellow inmates, family members, and government officials, Guantanamo’s Child acquaints us with an incredibly resilient young person who grew up in a tragic setting and analyses the political implications of his case.

Investigating a life that has sparked some of the most heated political debates in recent history, filmmakers Patrick Reed and Michelle Shephard reveal a young man who is cautiously ready for another chapter of his life. And for the first time, Omar Khadr himself tells us his side of the story.

Directed by: Michelle Shephard and Patrick Reed
Produced by: Peter Raymont, Michelle Shephard, Patrick Reed
Runtime: 80′
Country: Canada
White Pine Pictures

Discussion to be moderated by Richard Gizbert, presenter of Al Jazeera English’s The Listening Post, a weekly show that looks at news coverage by the world’s media. Gizbert has also spent 25 years working in the media world as a foreign correspondent, covering stories around the world.

Panelists:

Moazzam Begg is one of nine British citizens who were held at Camp X-Ray, Guantánamo Bay by the US government. He was released on January 25 2005 without charge. He is the director of outreach for advocacy group CAGE and author of Enemy Combatant. This year he was imprisoned by the British government on charges relating to Syria, his case was later dropped.

Michelle Shephard is an investigative reporter with the Toronto Star, author and filmmaker. With patrick Reed she co-directed Guantanamo’s Child, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2015.  Shephard has been awarded the Michener Award for public service journalism and won Canada’s top newspaper prize, the National Newspaper Award, three times.  In 2011, she was an associate producer on the Oscar-nominated documentary Under Fire: Journalists in Combat.  She produced the National Film Board documentary, “Prisoners of the Absurd,” which premiered at Amsterdam’s film festival in 2014.  

Cori Crider heads the Abuses in Counter-Terrorism team at international NGO Reprieve. A U.S. lawyer, Cori has spent a decade investigating and litigating the most serious violations of the ‘war on terror’: Guantánamo, CIA rendition and torture, and civilian deaths from drone attacks in undeclared war zones.
She devised Reprieve’s challenge to abusive force-feeding at Guantánamo, which resulted in the first disclosure of videotapes of the process. She also developed Reprieve’s project investigating the drone war in Yemen: her team exposed key details of a drone strike on a wedding convoy, and brought a Yemeni man whose innocent relatives died in an attack to Washington, D.C. She represents two Libyan families whom U.S. and British intelligence ‘rendered’ to the dungeons of dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Cori regularly gives print and broadcast interviews on counter-terror abuses and has written for the Guardian, CNN, al Jazeera, and the Huffington Post.