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Wed Jul 16,2008,
15:05 GMT
Omar Khadr's Moment in Peep
Posted by Hal
It’s almost embarrassing to put the plight of Omar Khadr into a Peep culture context, but nevertheless, the release yesterday of video surveillance tapes showing his interrogation have made him part of Peep. The tapes remind us that secret video made public can be a powerful force.
As with the Rodney King beating caught on video by happenstance or the video of 3 year old James Bulger being led out of a Liverpool shopping mall by two ten year-old boys who later took his life, secret video cameras have produced some of the most searing imagery of 21st century life. Not only are we drawn to these videos — drawn, inexorably, to the allure of real (unperformed) life actually happening — but the videos themselves operate in a moral grey zone between the necessity (or impossibility) of intervention, and the allure of Peep which turns everything, from the mundane to the horrifying, into consumable spectacle.
In the case of Khadr, as with all the examples above and so many others, the video tape doesn’t solve anything. While some see a tortured teenager, others, such as Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno, see “a freak of terrorism in Omar Khadr, groomed to kill” and a “a teenager blubbering for pity…A man-child mewling: ‘Nobody cares about me.’ “
DiManno’s column on Khadr makes many excellent points – he was a pawn used by his family, he was a child soldier accused of throwing a grenade in the course of fighting a war (not a terrorist). But at the end of it all she seems to be seduced by the video, drawn into interpreting the image. In so doing she gives the image more power than the known facts about the “man-child” and his circumstances. This is the danger of the Peep tradition of releasing secret videotape for all to see. We can rarely agree on what we see, and the videotape makes even more murky what, it seems, should be so clear.
For the record: Canada’s complicity in Khadr’s interrogation is an international embarrassment, read my complete take on it at here at allvoices.com.
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The Bloggist
Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a writer/thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and daughter. Up till now I’ve always considered myself a private person. But at the same time I’m fascinated by people who effortlessly open themselves up to the whole world. So I’ve… more...
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