It’s not easy being a Canadian spook. Canadians are such nice, sucky people that our spies can’t play the kind of no-holds-barred hardball that’s needed to save us from the scumbags. This is the really big story that jumps out from the most recent WikiLeaks mega-leak.

Seems that one day in 2008, then-CSIS chief Jim Judd was schmoozing with a State Department official named Elliot Cohen. Mr. Cohen, who took notes, was no ordinary faceless bureaucrat. He’s a high-profile neo-con who had been among the first of his species to publicly advocate war against Iraq and Iran too. Like so many idealistic neo-cons, there was virtually no limit to the amount of death and destruction he was prepared to contemplate to realize those ideals.

Clearly Mr. Judd wanted to impress Mr. Cohen with his conundrum. As WikiLeaks reveals, the CSIS chief bragged about his agency’s deep devotion to the fight against terrorists while kvetching about how constrained he was in carrying it out effectively.

At the time, busybody Canadian courts were looking into CSIS complicity in U.S. actions that had led to the torture of terrorism suspects. This naturally included terrorism suspects with no links to terrorism. So, for example, on the basis of wholly fabricated information provided by CSIS, a Canadian named Maher Arar was kidnapped by American officials and “rendered” to Syria for torture.

Then there’s Abousfian Abdelrazik, whose life was similarly ruined by his own Canadian government. At the request of CSIS, he was detained in his birthplace, Sudan, endured physical and psychological torture, and was repeatedly betrayed by the Harper government, which refused to let him return home to Montreal. His forced exile, which lasted six years, ended 16 months ago. There’s never been any evidence to link him to terrorists.

Yet Mr. Abdelrazik remains in limbo. Our government takes no responsibility for the central role it played in his ordeal. Nor has it helped to remove the sanctions imposed on him when his name was arbitrarily placed on the UN Security Council’s notorious “1267 list.” Under these sanctions, it’s illegal for anyone to provide him with any financial aid, although many nice, sucky Canadians illegally do just that. (The list is proudly public.) Thanks to Stephen Harper, whom Mr. Judd lauded to the Americans, Mr. Abdelrazik remains a non-person in his own country.

But the tough luck of Messrs. Arar and Abdelrazik was not Mr. Judd’s preoccupation. Omar Khadr was. Just before the spy chief’s let-it-all-hang-out chinwag with Mr. Cohen, a Federal Court judge had ordered the release of a classified video showing a CSIS agent grilling Mr. Khadr at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Mr. Khadr was then 16. This ruling was giving Mr. Judd heartburn. He whined about the “Alice in Wonderland” worldview of Canadians and told Mr. Cohen that Canada’s courts had tied poor CSIS “in knots.” As the Cheshire Cat pointed out, “we’re all mad here.”

Mr. Judd fretted that the video would trigger “knee-jerk anti-Americanism” and “paroxysms of moral outrage, a Canadian specialty.” What must he be thinking now about WikiLeaks? It’s bad enough Mr. Judd had to endure squishy judges who sometime gave priority to human rights; now CSIS has to cope with Mr. Judd’s confidences being splashed all over the world’s media. Maybe the spy chief’s successor will follow the advice of long-time Conservative guru Tom Flanagan and simply have WikiLeaks director Julian Assange rubbed out.

As it happens, that pesky interrogation video is the basis for a new full-length, Canadian-made documentary about Omar Khadr. Now you can finally judge for yourself if a paroxysm or two of moral outrage is warranted or not. You Don’t Like the Truth: Four Days Inside Guantánamo, consists of excerpts from seven hours of video footage that were taken over four days in 2003 when a CSIS agent, accompanied by two weirdly silent colleagues (one a CIA woman), arrive to “interview” Mr. Khadr. He is then all of 16 years old.

At first he innocently believes his guest is a Canadian official come to offer him support. But the obvious truth soon dawns on him. The creep is out to get him. CSIS has obviously bought holus bolus the dubious U.S. version of things. Why not? Would the American government lie? Forget Pat Tillman’s invented death in Afghanistan and Jessica Lynch’s invented ordeal in Iraq. Our CSIS spook has no doubt Mr. Khadr is guilty of having murdered an American soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan and hasn’t the slightest interest in anything Mr. Khadr says or in child-soldier issues or how a soldier can be said to be guilty of murder during a war anyway.

The documentary’s Quebec directors invoke outsiders from time to time to comment on the interrogation. For example, the Toronto Star‘s excellent national security reporter Michelle Shephard is convinced that Mr. Khadr did not toss the hand grenade that killed an American soldier in the fight. She shows photos of Mr. Khadr buried under rubble after an American plane bombed his compound to smithereens. When he’s eventually dug out, he’s unconscious, lying face down with bloody bullet holes in his back. He also took shrapnel in one eye. This 15-year old couldn’t have killed anyone, the photo suggests.

I know that we’ll each see this revealing documentary through our own biases. Through mine I saw a kid, severely wounded a year earlier, plausibly claiming to have been badly tortured and grilled by Americans back in Afghanistan, and never once wavering during four solid days of duplicitous and unsympathetic interrogation. “I didn’t do anything,” he insists on the third day. “I didn’t do anything to get me here.” He insists he wasn’t even participating in the fighting when an American soldier found him and shot him three times. Watching his changing body language is a revelation in itself.

By the fourth day the CSIS man, exasperated that he’s failed to shake Mr. Khadr’s story one iota, demands that he tells him the truth. Mr. Khadr replies: “That’s what I told you, the truth. You don’t like the truth. … You just want to hear whatever you want to hear. … You can’t believe me.” This 16-year old is either an Academy Award-calibre actor or he’s telling the truth.

Mr. Khadr’s lawyers say that in six years, they’ve had “absolutely no assistance” on the case from the Canadian government. Gar Pardy, a former Canadian diplomat, points out that the government of Canada has “an absolute obligation” to protect all Canadians.

Like Maher Arar and Abousfian Abdelrazik, Omar Khadr is a Muslim. Is this merely a coincidence? Are all ethnic or religious groups equal in the eyes of the ethnic-loving Harper government?

In September, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the government had violated Mr. Khadr’s rights when CSIS interrogated him. In October, to avoid a 40-year sentence, Omar Khadr pleaded guilty and received a sentence of eight years.

Mr. Khadr, a Canadian citizen by birth, is the first child soldier condemned for a war crime since the Nuremburg Tribunal defined the concept shortly after the Second World War. A curious first from us nice, sucky Canadians.

This post first appeared in The Globe and Mail.

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Gerry Caplan

Gerald Caplan has an MA in Canadian history and a Ph.D. in African history from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. He is an author, teacher, media commentator,...