Majid Khan, who
underwent ‘enhanced interrogation’, says authorities poured ice water on his
genitals and hung him naked from a beam for days
Reuters in New
York
Tuesday 2 June
2015 12.16 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 2 June 2015 12.31 EDT
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.
Analysis Rectal
rehydration and waterboarding: the CIA torture report's grisliest findings
Parts
of the CIA interrogation programme were known, but the catalogue of abuse is
nightmarish, especially knowing much more will never be revealed
Read
more
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.”
© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated
companies. All rights reserved.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment