They came with Big Macs and Cokes, quintessential symbols of America all over the world. It was fitting that the Canadian secret service interrogators brought 16 year-old Omar Khadr American fast food. Their presence in America's infamous Cuban prison, Guantanamo Bay, helped extend and reaffirm the United State's deployment of an arrogant, quick serve imperialism that condones the torture of teenagers and the dispensing of due process and democracy.

Yesterday, videos were released showing the interrogation of then sixteen year-old Omar Khadr, taken into custody when he was fifteen by American forces in Afghanistan. The videos, which were released by court order after a multi-year fight between Khadr's Canadian lawyers and the Canadian government, show Khadr crying, tearing at his clothing, and begging for help.
But the men Canada sent weren't there to help him. They were there to see if his year in prison had softened him up. Alleged to have been denied sleep in the days and nights preceding the interrogation, alleged to have been tortured (at one point, he alleges through his lawyers, guards shackled his hands and legs together and used him as a human mop to wipe up his own urine), Khadr was relieved to encounter officials from his home country and did his best to answer their questions. Until he realized that the Canadians were simply an extension of US policy, a kind of twisted extraordinary rendition that saw him loaned to his home country in the hopes that they could do more with him by extending the carrot of Canada then the US had managed to do to him through threats, (probable) torture, solitary confinement and denial of his rights.

And so it's come to this: Canada seen doing the dirty work for a corrupt American administration made up of people as reviled in their home country as they are internationally. As a Canadian, I'm ashamed. As someone with an enduring love and belief in the potential of the United States to be a force for good in the world, I'm embarrassed. And as a human being I'm disgusted.

Khadr is accused of killing a member of the United States Armed forces, the final act of a routed Taliban unit holed up in a cave. He's been presumed guilty and locked up in the harshest possible circumstances for 5 and a half years. Give him a fair trial in a non-military court and, if found guilty, treat him like any minor found guilty of a heinous act - give him mental help and
rehabilitation. Recognize that he is but a pawn - his parents sent him to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban before he was old enough to drive, buy a beer, vote, or join the Canadian or US military. Once there, he was pressed into service. He had no money, no family, no one to turn to. Only he knows what he thought and felt at that time, but it's clear to any external observer that his options were pretty limited to doing what he was told, whether he liked it or not. As he pleadingly asked his Canadian interrogator: "What could I do? What other choice did I have?"

Khadr had no choices. But the Canadian and US governments had lots of choices. The US didn't have to treat him as if he was the second coming of Osama Bin Laden, indisputably guilty with no ameliorating circumstances and, furthermore, in possession of the co-ordinates of Al-Quaeda's secret headquarters. Canada could have, as the UK and Australia did, demanded the
return of all Canadian citizens held at Guantanamo, setting the stage for a humane trial and rehabilitation. Instead, the US endlessly interrogated a teenager and Canada sent over some stooges to help.

And now, we sit at home and watch what passed for the war on terror on YouTube, Khadr begging to be taken back to Canada, his folksy inquisitor saying, oh, gee, we can't help you with that, I mean, gee, we can't all get what we want, after all, and here's the actual quote now, I mean, gee, "I want to stay in Cuba with you, can you help me with that? Weather's nice, there's no snow..." No wonder Khadr is shown soon after weeping and muttering and pulling at his orange jumpsuit, a portrait of a young man who never had a chance, a fifteen year-old kid treated as a master terrorist by a country supposedly fighting for freedom and democracy, and then abandoned by his own country - one supposedly known for its upholding
of international law, human rights and common decency.

So what's next for Khadr? McCain and Obama would like nothing better than to ship the shattered fellow back to Canada. Canadians need to pull together and demand that he is, indeed, sent here and treated fairly once he arrives. In 2003, when Khadr's lawyers presented allegations of his torture in Guantanamo, one reporter yelled, "Why should Canadians care about Khadr's treatment? Isn't there Khadr-family fatigue?" This is the kind of nonsense, a jumble of polls and statistics and meaningless demonizing that allowed two impudent governments to treat Khadr with such cruelty in the first place. The video of this young man's interrogation only makes one thing clear: Khadr is a human being. We should care about him for that reason, for that reason alone.

Why is that when corporations sue each other, we're the ones who end up suffering? Case in
point is Viacom's ridiculous lawsuit against YouTube. Viacom wants Google (who owns
YouTube) to bleed to the tune of a billion dollars because clips from programs like ViaCom's
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and SpongeBob SquarePants are sometimes uploaded to the
service. A recent court ruling in the legal squabble between entertainment giants has seen the
judge presiding over the case order Google to give Viacom its record of, essentially, who viewed
what videos when on YouTube. News reports tell us that the database to be handed over
"includes information on when each video gets played, which can be used to determine how
often a clip is viewed. Attached to each entry is each viewer's unique login ID and the Internet
Protocol, or IP, address for that viewer's computer."

This lawsuit should not exist in the first place. At the very least, individuals should be allowed to
re-purpose corporate copyrighted material transmitted over a monopolistic cable system which,
though overseen and controlled by the government and theoretically the citizens of the United
States, utterly and totally excludes us from any active participation (unless you call voting for
your favorite on So You Think You Can Dance programming). In other words, throw us a bone.
But no, this is what repressive anti-user-rights copyright law leads to: corporations suing
corporations over who has the right to make money off of us. Corporation 1 (Google) thinks they
should make money off of us by allowing us to upload short clips of material produced by other
corporations. Corporation 2 (Viacom) thinks even that tiny amount of participation in our own
mass culture - basically making our own commercials for our own favorite tv shows - is too
much to allow the average citizen. Either way, we're getting screwed but who cares about people
when you're raking in the bucks?

Which brings us to the lawsuit. Telling one mass media entertainment corporation that they have
to hand over all their viewing records to another mass media entertainment corporation is,
frankly, pretty bizarre. Bad enough that Google is recording everything we watch and keeping
those records on file forever. But, hey, you should send them to another company and why not
make a copy for the Justice Department and the CIA while you're at it? Why should any
company's greedy desire for more cash be privileged over our right to look at whatever we want
when we want to look at it? What's next? Is Random House going to sue the New York Public
Library system for lending "free" books? And is the court going to say, well, let's just see how
many books we're talking about here and tell the library system to give Amazon a list of
everyone who's taken out a book, including the title and how long they kept it at their home?

The library analogy isn't a spurious one. For decades, and particularly since 9/11, librarians have
fought a running battle to keep law enforcement's hands out of that particular cookie jar. We
should have the right to borrow a book from the library without our reading preferences (and
what they reveal about our lives) being subject to scrutiny by a rival library system, an angry
corporation or a government agency. I don't see how this is any different - what we watch should
be between us and the bean counters at Google and no one else. Moreover, what we watch has
value - if we want to share that information with anyone else (other than Google who we agree to
give the info to for free in exchange for the service they provide) we should be compensated. But
who cares about us? We're just people and, as we've seen time and time again, when the titans
clash people don't matter.

A few months back I joined something called Help A Reporter. It's the brainchild of publicist/marketing entrepreneur Peter Shankman. Basically what happens is that twice a day I get a list sent to my email that consists of reporters looking for sources for stories. Here's one of the shorter lists to give you an idea of how this works:

1) Podcasters with Tangible Results

2) Wedding Party Trends

3) Outrageous Bridal Bouquets

4) Ignore your Doc's advice?

Each query comes with contact information for the reporter. The idea behind the list is that, obviously, it helps reporters find the people they need for their stories. At the same time, it helps publicists and marketing types pitch reporters regarding their clients. So say your client is a herbal healer with a new book about ignoring doctors, well, you'd be pretty stupid if you didn't call up the reporter behind query #4 and offer to hook that reporter up with an interview.

Anyway, I'm of two minds about this list. On the one hand, sure, why not? Journalists require a steady flow of personal stories about actual people. A decent article about anything from the subprime mortgage crisis to working parents who watch their children at daycare via webcam always starts with, "Melissa George, a 43 year old mother from Schenectady...etc." Well guess what? Those individual stories can be hard to come by. You hear rumors, innuendoes, trends and gossip but where do you actually find the people doing something or affected by something? In the past you'd have to use up a little of the old shoe leather, actually pounding the pavement, making calls, going places. There's lot of pressure on journalist now to produce more quicker. Who has the time? So now you've got what Shankman calls HARO to help you out.

But what makes me uneasy about this is that it's too easy. It feels like cheating. Suddenly instead of going out there and finding a source that's representative of an overall trend, you're sitting back and waiting for someone to come to you. Not only that, you're waiting for them to pitch you: please put me in your story. Please give me valuable attention and publicity. A query like "Diets Gone Too Far (Glamour)" makes me wonder who's out their pitching their story and for what purpose.

The list is also interesting for what it suggests about our mass media. There's an obsession with the telling of personal stories, with getting people to reveal their pain. A recent list sent out included the diet story, a search for people who decorated a room or house based on a movie, a reporter looking for stories of "relationship challenges", and a reporter on the prowl for stories about people forced to downsize their homes in poor market conditions - "Did you take a loss on your home or merely accept more than you had hoped to gain? Did you decide to rent until the market turns around? Did the move have anything to do with saving gas or rising

utility costs? Etc. As this is for a top tier personal finance nation monthly, we need people who are photogenic and willing to give details related to their move."

That last query is particularly telling: we want to portray the pain in detail, but we also want the people to be, uh, appealing ie. middle class "photogenic", not, like, living in a shelter or anything. So the people who are going to pitch themselves for these stories are going to be a certain kind of person - middle class, intelligent, aware of how to trade their tale for attention and hopefully some gain down the road.

None of this is particularly surprising, but HARO just brings it to the forefront in a new way. If you want to take the pulse of what constitutes journalism in America, sign up. It's free. Pitch a reporter. Tell them you're decorating your cardboard box (home for the summer) with pictures of outrageous wedding bouquets, photogenic downsizers, and middle class dieters ignoring their doctor's advice -- all culled from discarded back issues of America's top tier magazines!

A recent survey by US information security company Cyber-Ark reveals that “One in three
information technology professionals abuses administrative passwords to access confidential data
such as colleagues' salary details, personal e-mails or board-meeting minutes.” Additionally, a
full  half of the IT types surveyed admitted to “accessing information that was not relevant to
their role.”
    This revelation isn’t much of a surprise to me. Behind the facade of secrecy erected by
corporations and governments and bureaucracies all over the world, there’s the obsession to
know. And the more try to make something secret, the more people want to gain access to those
secrets and spread them around.
    I don’t think most people are out to rip anyone off. It’s more a reflex action. Knowledge
is power. Knowledge is knowing what everyone is thinking and doing and going to think and do.
Social anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues that language evolved from the way apes use
grooming to establish social groups and exclude those who didn’t belong. In other words, if you
put in the time and got to know all the other apes by slowly and methodically picking through
their fur, you were in. If you just waltzed into the group and figured they’d take care of you, well,
think again buddy.
    So we’re basically apes who still see the value in knowing everything for our own
protection and survival, even as we live in a regimented, secrecy obsessed techno-society where
the left hand can’t access the right hand’s laptop with a password.
    Recently, I spoke with a fellow who worked as the IT guy at a film production company.
He told me he started reading the company emails when he became insecure about his job. But
very quickly it became addictive. At first, this fellow couldn’t get over the sense of power he had:
“Once you cross the line why not read all this stuff? I’m reading personal emails between the
bosses, about other people in the company, so it was like very strange.”  But the disconnect
between what was being said and what he was finding out to be true was more and more
disconcerting. “I started reading other people’s emails, coworkers about dating and stuff.  The
world I was seeing in these emails was totally different from the reality sitting around me.”
    Eventually, our young IT guy found himself addicted to reading every email in the office,
hating himself while doing it, but not knowing how or even why he should stop.
    It’s quite telling that we live in an age where we spend so much time obsessing about
secrets that when we actually gain access to the ‘truth’, it feels like we’ve done something wrong.

It's summer when the big bears roam the national parks looking for yummy pudgy tourists, so let's turn our attention to Project Grizzly.  This movie was released to much acclaim and fascination in 1996 and it's being screened again in Toronto in a few weeks, when the Cinemateque Ontario does a June 20 - 28 retrospective of the work of PG director Peter Lynch. If you haven't seen this movie and you're anywhere near Toronto, do yourself a favour and take it in. Otherwise, rent or buy a copy of this remarkable flick. PG tells the story of North Bay, Ontario's Troy Hurtubise. Troy is obsessed with battling a Grizzly Bear. While Lynch films, Troy constructs ever more cumbersome and unbelievable grizzly bear-proof suits for his inevitable conflict with the giant beast of a bear. Troy puts his suits through the paces -- he rolls down cliffs, has his buddies shoot at him in the suit, and finally pronounces himself ready for action. I'm not going to tell you what happens. You've got to see it for yourself. But this movie is a deserved cult classic, mainly because of the way it takes Troy's obsession and makes it more than a joke. By the end of the doc, you're thinking about the human animal's severed relationship to the wild. You're thinking about how disconnected from the land we are, and yet how primal we really are when you get right down to it.

These themes come to the fore in an exhibit that will be on in Toronto at Trinity Square Video from June 19th to July 12th. Called Grizzly Proof, the exhibit is a kind of  testimonial to the staying power of the documentary. It consists of artists from around the world responding to Troy's quest and Lynch's movie. It first showed in New York in 2007 under the auspices of art collective Flux Factory. And now it's showing in Toronto alongside the retrospective, another great reason to come to Toronto, see the film on the big screen, then check out items including Troy's original suit, plus artwork in the form of a Foosball table, a sleeping bag, hairy blobs, and so much more.

Why are we obsessed with the grizzly bear? Another amazing documentary you should check out before wandering off to Yellowstone with a back-pack of jam sandwiches is Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man. This doc tells the story of Timothy Treadwell's ultimately deadly fascination with the bears. A very different tone than Lynch's movie. In Herzog's brooding Grizzly Man, Treadwell wants to be bear's best friend. In Project Grizzly, Troy wants to show the Grizzly that he's not afraid to take him on, bear vs. man, the ultimate wrestling match. Both men are full of misguided hubris but, ironically, it's Troy who lives to tell the tale.