GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – A suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned al-Qaida courier, speaking to a military jury for the first time, gave a detailed account this past week of the brutal forced feedings, crude waterboarding and other physical and sexual abuse he endured during his 2003 to 2006 detention in the CIA's overseas prison network.
Appearing in open court, Majid Khan, 41, became the first former prisoner of the black sites to openly describe, anywhere, the violent and cruel "enhanced interrogation techniques" that agents used to extract information and confessions from terrorism suspects.
He spoke about dungeonlike conditions, humiliating stretches of nudity with only a hood on his head, sometimes while his arms were chained in ways that made sleep impossible, and being intentionally nearly drowned in icy cold water in tubs at two sites, once while a CIA interrogator counted down from 10 before water was poured into his nose and mouth.
Soon after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003, Khan said, he cooperated with his captors, telling them everything he knew, with the hope of release. "Instead, the more I cooperated, the more I was tortured," he said.
So, like other victims of torture, he said he manufactured tales that his captors wanted to hear: "I lied just to make the abuse stop."
Khan offered the dark accounting Thursday to a jury of eight U.S. military officers who on Friday deliberated for less than three hours and sentenced him to 26 years in prison, starting from his guilty plea in February 2012.
But the sentence is largely symbolic, a military commission requirement.
Unknown to the jurors, Khan and his lawyers reached a secret deal this year with a senior Pentagon official in which his actual sentence could end as early as February and no later than February 2025 because Khan became a government cooperator upon pleading guilty.
Jurors were told they could sentence Khan in a range of 25-40 years for four terrorism charges, including murder in violation of the law of war, for delivering $50,000 from Pakistan to an al-Qaida affiliate in early 2003. The money was used in a deadly bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, in August 2003, while Khan was a prisoner of the CIA.
He also admitted to plotting a number of other crimes with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, notably by wearing a suicide vest in a failed effort in 2002 to assassinate the president of Pakistan at the time, Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally in the war on terror.
The lead prosecutor, Col. Walter Foster IV of the Army, asked the panel to focus on the 11 people who were killed and the dozens wounded in the Marriott attack. He said Khan "went willingly to jihad and al-Qaida" and "only stopped when he was captured." He conceded that Khan got "extremely rough treatment" in CIA custody but said he "is still alive," which is "a luxury" the victims do not have.
Khan's lawyer, Maj. Michael Lyness, emphasized the prisoner's declarations of contrition, long-running cooperation with the government and desire to return to society as a peaceful father to a daughter born after he was arrested.
Lyness was far more blunt about the prisoner's "rough treatment," which he called "heinous and vile acts of torture."
"Majid was raped at the hands of the U.S. government," Lyness told the panel of more senior officers. "He told them everything from the beginning."
Sentencing was delayed for nearly a decade to give Khan time and opportunity to cooperate with federal and military prosecutors, so far behind the scenes, in federal and military terrorism cases. In the intervening years, prosecutors and defense lawyers clashed in court filings over who would be called to testify about Khan's abuse in CIA custody.
In court Thursday, Khan read from a carefully worded 39-page account that did not identify CIA agents or the countries and foreign intelligence agencies that had a role in his secret detention at black sites — information that is protected at the national security court. He expressed remorse for hurting people through his embrace of radical Islam and al-Qaida, but also found a way around a labyrinth of U.S. intelligence classifications to realize a decadelong ambition to tell the world what U.S. agents had done to him.
"To those who tortured me, I forgive you," he said, noting that while he was in custody he had rejected al-Qaida, terrorism, "violence and hatred."
