Of all her sorrows and humiliations, the loss of Omar seems to hurt most. She says he is a good boy, the best boy. When she saw him last he was under pressure, writing his Grade Eight exams, but still well-mannered and respectful: “He likes to help. We have all the kids around, someone has to go to the store to bring something, someone says ‘Not me, not me,’ he says, ‘Okay, I’ll go.’ So you love him, you must love him. Someone polite, obedient; you love him.”
When she talks about Omar her grief seems at times to circle back and focus on herself, as though it has nowhere else to go. Her doctor says her arthritis has been aggravated by stress. Her husband’s had a heart attack. Perhaps she comes back to herself because there’s not much of Omar’s story that’s new. He’s been in detention for almost two years. At first he wrote her dutifully, numbering his letters so she could tell when the censors held onto one, as they sometimes did, but when the Red Cross visited him a few months ago he said he didn’t want to write any more. Fatmah’s daughter has just returned from Pakistan with the youngest child, his legs limp and useless. Perhaps it’s natural that the memory of Omar sometimes seems to fade a little.
January, 2004. Camp Delta is neither here nor there nor, legally, anywhere. It is a small portion of an equivocal place, Guantanamo Bay, at an intersection of opposing sovereignties, geographically in Cuba but leased and controlled for the last 101 years by the U.S., centrally located in the forty-five square-mile American naval base. It contains a McDonald’s, a Kentucky Fried Chicken, and a golf course. Because of its jurisdictional ambiguity it seems an ideal place to bring prisoners whose legal status is uncertain, so it also contains a prison camp with some 660 detainees from forty-two countries. It is ringed with chain-link fence below coils of razor wire. The fence is hung with green tarpaulin so the men cannot see the Caribbean.
Among them is a young Canadian citizen with a damaged shoulder and a damaged eye. I’d been trying to reach Omar Khadr for months. I had tried the U.S. government, the Canadian government, the Pentagon; I’d picked my way through long, dense ranks of lawyers and sent inquiries by phone and e-mail, to the Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs. The Americans confirmed they had him in custody in Guantanamo as of October 31, 2002, but had said nothing since. So here I was in more-or-less-Cuba, as close to Omar Khadr as I was going to get.
He was probably no more than 200 yards from me, here inside the wire of the detention camp. Maybe he was in a suicide-watch cell, or a special cell for the despondent, but more probably than not he would be here in the maximum-security section of Camp Delta, in a plain, small cage with steel-mesh walls, one of about forty-eight in a cell block built by the American engineering firm Kellogg, Brown and Root. Each cell has an unshielded squat toilet and a steel platform to sleep on, with an arrow stencilled on it to show the direction to Mecca. The detainees in maximum security leave their cells only for interrogation, for showers, for medical care, or for an occasional few minutes of supervised exercise. If Omar was still on the base he was almost certainly here. If I shouted his name he might hear me: he speaks English, of course. But I could not do that, and if he or another of the men were to shout to me, I was forbidden to answer. I had signed a promise to obey a set of rules governing the behaviour of visitors to the U.S. Armed Forces detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
I was kicking sand by the sally port, the camp gate, half-listening to other reporters interview the U.S. Army chaplains about the spiritual needs of the prison guards. I was carrying a two-year-old picture of Omar, although there was no point in showing it to anyone – the guards wouldn’t talk about individual prisoners. Omar is a sallow, chubby, plain-looking boy with a thinly shadowed upper lip. Probably somewhat changed now: children do change.
The chaplain, Captain Khallid Shabazz, wasn’t sweating under the more-or-less Cuban sun; there wasn’t a drop on his ebony skin, and his pressed brown uniform was daisy-fresh. He told our shabby, humid little group of journalists (Canal 5 from Paris, Basque print and television, Die Zeit, Carlton television from Britain) that he ministered to the prison guards (some of whom are Muslim), that the detainees dealt with their own spiritual development but that he made sure they had the materials they needed, prayer beads and copies of the Koran: “We don’t want them to leave with a bitter taste in their mouths. We want them to know what America is all about.” I looked at him quickly, but his wide dark face was clear of all irony.
I framed a question for Captain Shabazz, writing it out carefully in my notebook to make sure I sounded as impressive as possible. “Captain,” I was about to say, “you arrest people on the basis of undivulged evidence, shackle them, blindfold them, seal their ears, fly them around the world, keep them without charge in solitary confinement or close quarters for months without access to legal or diplomatic aid, interrogate them till you’re done with them – and expect them at that point. . . .” But when I looked up Shabazz had gone off to deal with another reporter, and beyond him there was an offended rustling in another group of guards: the correspondent from Die Zeit wanted to know how Camp Delta dealt with the question of masturbation.
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