OTTAWA — Video recordings released Tuesday showing interrogations of the only Canadian held at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba provided an unprecedented glimpse inside the compound.
The mood of the detainee, Omar Khadr, just 16 years old at the time of the interrogations, in February 2003, swings between calm and indifference to rage and grief in the recordings, which were released by his lawyers.
The video footage, which provides the most extensive videotaped images yet seen from inside Guantánamo Bay, shows Mr. Khadr pleading with a Canadian intelligence agent for help and, at one point, shows him displaying chest and back wounds that had still not healed months after his capture in Afghanistan.
The poor quality recordings were made by the United States military, and were given to Mr. Khadr’s Canadian lawyers by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service under the terms of a court order.
They show Mr. Khadr, who is accused of killing a United States soldier in Afghanistan during a battle in July 2002, being questioned by an unidentified member of the Canadian intelligence agency.
In all, about seven hours of recordings were given to Mr. Khadr’s lawyers, but the lawyers released a selection of only about 10 minutes of video recording on Tuesday.
Mr. Khadr maintains that he was abused by American interrogators both at Guantánamo Bay and in Afghanistan. It appears from the recordings, as well as from written documents of the interrogations that were released last week, that Mr. Khadr initially believed that the Canadian agent had come to help him.
But Mr. Khadr eventually seems to realize that the agent is only there to extract information.
