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Wednesday, June 3, 2015
CIA sex abuse and torture went beyond Senate report disclosures, detainee says
CIA sex abuse and torture went beyond Senate report disclosures, detainee says
Majid Khan, who underwent ‘enhanced interrogation’, says authorities
poured ice water on his genitals and hung him naked from a beam for days
US military guards move a detainee inside Camp VI at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2010.
Photograph: Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty Images
The US Central Intelligence Agency used a wider array of sexual abuse
and other forms of torture than was disclosed in a Senate report last
year, according to a Guantánamo Bay detainee turned government
cooperating witness.
Majid Khan said interrogators poured ice water on his genitals, twice
videotaped him naked and repeatedly touched his “private parts” – none
of which was described in the Senate report. Interrogators, some of whom
smelled of alcohol, also threatened to beat him with a hammer, baseball
bats, sticks and leather belts, Khan said.
Khan’s is the first publicly released account from a high-value
al-Qaida detainee who experienced the “enhanced interrogation
techniques” of President George W Bush’s administration after the
September 11, 2001 attacks on the US.
Khan’s account is contained in 27 pages of interview notes his
lawyers compiled over the past seven years. The US government cleared
the notes for release last month through a formal review process.
Before the Senate report detailed the agency’s interrogation methods
last December, CIA officials prohibited detainees and their lawyers
from publicly describing interrogation sessions, deeming detainees’
memories of the experience classified.
Khan’s detailed allegations of torture could not be independently confirmed. CIA officials have said they believed Khan repeatedly lied to them during interrogations.
The 35-year-old Khan, a Pakistani citizen who attended high school
in Maryland, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty in 2012 to
conspiracy, material support, murder and spying charges. In exchange for
serving as a government witness, Khan will be sentenced to up to 19
years in prison, with the term beginning on the date of his guilty plea.
Khan confessed to delivering $50,000 to al-Qaida operatives in
Indonesia. That money was later used to carry out the 2003 truck bombing
of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta that killed 11 people and wounded at
least 80 others. Khan also confessed to plotting with 9/11 mastermind
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to poison water supplies, blow up gas stations
and serve as a “sleeper agent” for al-Qaida in the United States.
Khan was captured in Pakistan and held at an unidentified CIA “black
site” from 2003 to 2006, according to the Senate report. Khan’s lawyers
declined to comment on where he was captured or held, which they said
remained classified.
In the interviews with his lawyers, Khan described a carnival-like
atmosphere of abuse when he arrived at the CIA detention facility.
“I wished they had killed me,” Khan told his lawyers. He said that
he experienced excruciating pain when hung naked from poles and that
guards repeatedly held his head under ice water.
“‘Son, we are going to take care of you,’” Khan said his
interrogators told him. “‘We are going to send you to a place you cannot
imagine.’”
Current and former CIA officials declined to comment on Khan’s account.
Khan’s description of his experience matches some of the most
disturbing findings of the US Senate report, the product of a five-year
review by Democratic staffers of 6.3m internal CIA documents. CIA
officials and many Republicans dismissed the report’s findings as
exaggerated.
Years before the report was released, Khan complained to his lawyers that he had been subjected to forced rectal feedings.
Senate investigators found internal CIA documents confirming that Khan
had received involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration. In an
incident widely reported in news media after the release of the Senate
investigation, CIA cables showed that “Khan’s ‘lunch tray’, consisting
of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was ‘pureed’ and
rectally infused”.
The CIA maintains that rectal feedings were necessary after Khan
went on a hunger strike and pulled out a feeding tube that had been
inserted through his nose. Senate investigators said Khan was
cooperative and did not remove the feeding tube.
Most medical experts say rectal feeding is of no therapeutic value. His lawyers call it rape.
Khan told his lawyers that some of the worst torture occurred in a
May 2003 interrogation session, when guards stripped him naked, hung him
from a wooden beam for three days and provided him with water but no
food. The only time he was removed from the beam was on the afternoon of
the first day, when interrogators shackled him, placed a hood over his
head and lowered him into a tub of ice water.
Majid Khan is pictured in this 2009 handout photograph taken at Guantánamo Bay. Photograph: Handout/Reuters
An interrogator then forced Khan’s head underwater until he feared
he would drown. The questioner pulled Khan’s head out of the water,
demanded answers to questions and again dunked his head underwater, the
detainee said. Guards also poured water and ice from a bucket on to
Khan’s mouth and nose.
Khan was again hung on the pole hooded and naked. Every two to three
hours, interrogators hurled ice water on his body and set up a fan to
blow air on him, depriving him of sleep, he said. Once, after hanging on
the pole for two days, Khan began hallucinating, thinking he was seeing
a cow and a giant lizard.
“I lived in anxiety every moment of every single day about the fear
and anticipation of the unknown,” Khan said, describing his panic
attacks and nightmares at the black site. “Sometimes, I was struggling
and drowning under water, or driving a car and I could not stop.“
In a July 2003 session, Khan said, CIA guards hooded and hung him
from a metal pole for several days and repeatedly poured ice water on
his mouth, nose and genitals. At one point, he said, they forced him to
sit naked on a wooden box during a 15-minute videotaped interrogation.
After that, Khan said, he was shackled to a wall, which prevented him
from sleeping.
When a doctor arrived to check his condition, Khan begged for help,
he said. Instead, Khan said, the doctor instructed the guards to again
hang him from the metal bar. After hanging from the pole for 24 hours,
Khan was forced to write a “confession” while being videotaped naked.
Khan’s account also includes previously undisclosed forms of alleged
CIA abuse, according to experts. Khan said his feet and lower legs were
placed in tall boot-like metal cuffs that dug into his flesh and
immobilized his legs. He said he felt that his legs would break if he
fell forward while restrained by the cuffs.
Khan is not one of the three people whom current and former CIA
officials say interrogators were authorized to “waterboard”, a process
whereby water is poured over a cloth covering a detainee’s face to
create the sensation of drowning. Nor is he the fourth detainee whose
waterboarding was documented by Human Rights Watch in 2012.
His descriptions, however, match those of other detainees who have
alleged that they were subjected to unauthorized interrogation
techniques using water. Human-rights groups say the use of ice water in
dousing and forced submersions is torture.
Khan’s account also includes details that match those of lower-level
detainees who have described their own interrogations. Like other
prisoners, Khan said he was held in complete darkness and isolated from
other prisoners for long periods. To deprive him of sleep, his captors
kept the lights on in his cell and blared loud music from Kiss and other
American rock and rap groups.
He said that he was given unclean food and water that gave him
diarrhea and that he was held in an outdoor cell and in cells with
biting insects. Other prisoners later told him they were held in
coffin-shaped boxes.
Conditions improved significantly in 2005, after the US Congress
passed the Detainee Treatment Act. That measure includes anti-torture
provisions sponsored by Senator John McCain, who was tortured as a
prisoner in Vietnam.
Khan is scheduled to be sentenced by a military judge in Guantánamo
Bay by February. His lawyers, however, want his case moved to the US
federal courts because, they said, federal law allows for fairer
sentences for cooperating witnesses.
“He has made a decision to trust the US government and cooperate
with the US government in order to try to atone for what he did,” said J
Wells Dixon of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “But it is
incumbent on the United States to treat him fairly.”
Katya Jestin, a former federal prosecutor who also represents Khan,
said Khan remains committed to cooperating in the military commission
system. But, she said, “from a broader criminal justice policy
perspective, I would like to see him sentenced in US federal court.
Federal judges have more experience in assessing the value of
cooperation and incentivizing cooperation from others.”
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