Majid Khan has been in U.S. custody since 2003.
His name is Majid Khan. Born in Pakistan, he is a legal resident of the United States, having lived in Maryland and graduated from a Baltimore high school in 1999. On a 2003 visit home to see his wife, he was taken into custody by Pakistani authorities and turned over to the CIA, which "disappeared" him to agency "black" sites, where he was tortured and interrogated and then shipped to the Guantánamo Bay detention center in 2006.
In early 2012, Khan pleaded guilty in a military tribunal to participation in terrorist acts, including acting as a money courier for Al Qaeda in a bomb plot that killed 11 in Indonesia. The plea bargain was a part of an agreement that requires Khan to serve less than 25 years in exchange for testifying against fellow high-level detainees at Guantánamo. Sentencing was delayed until 2016.
The Bush administration had argued in 2006 that Khan should not be allowed to talk to a lawyer because he might reveal U.S. interrogation methods. The Center for Constitutional Rights took up his case and filed three suits in his behalf, two of which were dismissed in 2012, and one of which became moot when military tribunals were established to try some of the detainees. Some observers said they saw the plea deal as a win for the government since it meant that Khan's testimony about torture would never see the light of day.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program includes extensive coverage of Khan's torture. A declassified summary of that report was released on December 9, 2014. The report says that Khan was subjected to sleep deprivation, stress positions, hanging from his arms and nudity as well as “rectal feeding,” a form of rape. He is said never to have provided any actionable intelligence.
Head below the fold to read more of Khan's story.
Last month, the government finally okayed the release of 27 pages of notes from Khan's interviews with his lawyers about his ordeal, but other material remains secret. Contained in those notes, David Rohde reports:
The U.S. 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 Guantanamo 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.
In January, in another of its many filings on behalf of Khan, the CCR
noted:
In the motion, CCR attorneys Gitanjali Gutierrez and Wells Dixon also state that the CIA “was demonstrably incorrect” when CIA director Michael Hayden claimed that videotaping of interrogations ended in 2002, and that "other unnamed intelligence officials have made a series of false statements about Khan's imprisonment and torture in CIA custody." The motion continues, "For instance, officials have said that his interrogations were not videotaped; that all videotaping stopped in 2002; and that enhanced interrogation techniques were only used on a small number of prisoners.”
Chances are any videotapes of Khan (and others) have been destroyed or, if they still exist, will not be seen by the public anytime soon. Just as the full 6,400-page torture report will never be released. It's not as if America's foes aren't familiar with what the CIA did. But some alleged patriots are determined to keep the details away from the eyes of the American public.