For first time in public, a detainee describes torture at CIA black websites

A suburban Baltimore highschool graduate turned al-Qaida courier, chatting with a navy jury for the primary time, gave an in depth account Thursday of the brutal pressured feedings, crude waterboarding and different bodily and sexual abuse he endured throughout his 2003 to 2006 detention within the CIA’s abroad jail community.
Appearing in open courtroom, Majid Khan, 41, grew to become the primary former prisoner of the black websites to overtly describe, anyplace, the violent and merciless “enhanced interrogation techniques” that brokers used to extract data and confessions from terrorism suspects.
For greater than two hours, he spoke about dungeonlike circumstances, humiliating stretches of nudity with solely a hood on his head, typically whereas his arms have been chained in ways in which made sleep not possible, and being deliberately practically drowned in icy chilly water in tubs at two websites, as soon as whereas a CIA interrogator counted down from 10 earlier than water was poured into his nostril and mouth.
Soon after his seize in Pakistan in March 2003, Khan mentioned, he cooperated along with his captors, telling them all the pieces he knew, with the hope of launch. “Instead, the more I cooperated, the more I was tortured,” he mentioned.
The dramatic accounting capped a day through which eight U.S. navy officers have been chosen to serve on a jury, which is able to deliberate Friday on his official sentence within the vary of 25 to 40 years, ranging from his responsible plea in February 2012.
But the sentence is essentially symbolic, a navy fee requirement
Unknown to the jurors, Khan and his attorneys reached a secret deal this 12 months with a senior Pentagon official through which his precise sentence might finish as early as February and no later than February 2025 as a result of Khan had turn into a authorities cooperator upon pleading responsible.
Jurors have been advised that in 2012 Khan pleaded responsible to terrorism prices, together with homicide in violation of the regulation of struggle, for delivering $50,000 of al-Qaida cash from Pakistan to an al-Qaida affiliate in early 2003. The cash was utilized in a lethal bombing of a Marriott resort in August 2003, whereas Khan was a prisoner of the CIA. He has mentioned he didn’t know the way the cash can be used.
He additionally admitted to plotting plenty of different crimes with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 assaults, notably by sporting a suicide vest in a failed effort in 2002 to assassinate the president of Pakistan on the time, Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally within the struggle on terrorism.

Sentencing was delayed for practically a decade to offer Khan time and alternative to cooperate with federal and navy prosecutors, to this point behind the scenes, in federal and navy terrorism instances. In the intervening years, prosecutors and protection attorneys clashed in courtroom filings over who can be referred to as to testify about Khan’s abuse in CIA custody, and the way.
In courtroom Thursday, Khan learn from a fastidiously worded 39-page account that didn’t determine CIA brokers or the international locations and overseas intelligence companies that had a job in his secret detention at black websites — data that’s protected on the nationwide safety courtroom. He expressed regret for hurting folks by way of his embrace of radical Islam and al-Qaida, but in addition discovered a method round a labyrinth of U.S. intelligence classifications to understand a decadelong ambition to inform the world what U.S. brokers had performed to him.
“To those who tortured me, I forgive you,” he mentioned, noting that whereas he was in custody he had rejected al-Qaida, terrorism, “violence and hatred.”
“I hope in the day of judgment that Allah will do the same for you and for me. I ask forgiveness from those whom I have wronged and I have hurt.”
It was an emotional day for Khan. His father, Ali, and a sister, each U.S. residents, sat behind the courtroom in a gallery, seeing him in individual for the primary time since he left the United States and joined al-Qaida after the Sept. 11 assaults. They have been 50 toes from him and didn’t appear to acknowledge the now balding middle-age man with a grey goatee when he first entered the courtroom.
After many minutes he caught their eyes, then waved. His father appeared startled. Khan craned his neck steadily throughout the proceedings to see his household — and at one level shaped a coronary heart along with his fingers.
He juxtaposed his remarks of contrition with beforehand unheard particulars of what occurred to him by the hands of the United States, the nation his dad and mom and siblings adopted by turning into residents at the same time as he didn’t.
His father wept by way of lengthy stretches of the descriptions, at instances hiding his head in his fingers, whereas his sister, additionally tearful, tried to consolation him. The jury of Marine, Navy and Army officers watched and listened soberly, however displayed no emotion.
He obtained beatings whereas nude and spent lengthy stretches in chains — at instances shackled to a wall and crouching “like a dog,” he mentioned, or along with his arms prolonged excessive above his head and chained to a beam inside his cell. He was saved in darkness and dragged, hooded and shackled, his head slamming into flooring, partitions and stairs as he was moved between cells.
Before the CIA moved him from one jail to a different, he mentioned, a medic inserted an enema after which put him in a diaper held in place by duct tape so he wouldn’t want a rest room break throughout flights. Guards shifting him would hood him, other than the time he had his face duct taped.
While held in a Muslim nation, he mentioned, his captors allowed him to hope. But at instances the Americans didn’t.
Earlier accounts launched by his attorneys mentioned he was so sleep disadvantaged for a time that he started to hallucinate. He described the expertise: pictures of a cow and a large lizard advancing on him inside a cell whereas he was chained to a beam above his head. He tried to kick them away however misplaced his stability, inflicting his chains to jerk him.
Khan gained consideration with the discharge of a 2014 research of the CIA program by the Senate Intelligence Committee that mentioned, after he refused to eat, his captors “infused” a puree of his lunch by way of his anus. The CIA referred to as it rectal refeeding. Khan referred to as it rape.
The CIA pumped water up the rectum of prisoners who wouldn’t comply with a command to drink. Khan mentioned this was performed to him with “green garden hoses. They connected one end to the faucet, put the other in my rectum and they turned on the water.” He mentioned he misplaced management of his bowels after these episodes and, to this present day, has hemorrhoids.

He spoke about failed and sadistic responses to his starvation strikes and different acts of revolt. Medics would roughly insert a feeding tube up his nostril and down the again of his throat. He would attempt to chunk it off and, in no less than one occasion, he mentioned, a CIA officer used a plunger to power meals inside his abdomen, a method that brought about abdomen cramps and diarrhea.
The intelligence company declined Thursday to touch upon the descriptions provided within the listening to however famous that the CIA’s detention and interrogation program resulted in 2009.
Lawyers sought permission to carry Khan’s spouse and daughter, who was born after his seize, to the courtroom, however the commander of the navy’s Southern Command, which oversees jail operations, opposed their attendance. Like Khan, who acquired everlasting resident standing as a boy within the United States however by no means grew to become a U.S. citizen, his spouse and daughter are residents of Pakistan.
Khan started by telling the jury that he was born in Saudi Arabia and was raised in Pakistan, the youngest son of eight siblings, till his father acquired a gasoline station in Maryland and moved the household to the United States when he was 16. He went on to graduate from a highschool in suburban Baltimore and was working for a telecommunications contractor that managed the Pentagon cellphone system on the time of the Sept. 11 assaults.

He described the assaults and the dying of his mom months earlier in 2001 as a turning level in his life.
Until then, he mentioned, he had straddled two worlds: his conventional Pakistani household life and that of an American teenager who “smoked weed occasionally and had my share of girlfriends,” each of which he hid from his mom. After she died, he mentioned, he was drawn to practising Islam.
He rejected the reason that Muslims had carried out the assault, “thinking that this was just another way the universe was kicking me while I was down, making me question my faith in Islam.”
During a household journey to Pakistan in 2002 — through which each he and his sister discovered spouses in organized marriages — he encountered family, cousins and an uncle who had in earlier years joined the jihad in Afghanistan and had ties to al-Qaida.
“I was lost and vulnerable, and they went after me,” he mentioned, together with by exhibiting him “propaganda videos” in regards to the detention operation at Guantánamo, the bottom the place he can be transferred for trial in 2006.
“I went willingly to al-Qaida,” he mentioned. “I was stupid, so incredibly stupid. But they promised to relieve my pain and purify my sins. They promised to redeem me, and I believed them.”