Military jury condemns torture of terrorist and urges clemency

GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA >> Seven senior U.S. military officers who sentenced a terrorist to 26 years in prison Friday after hearing graphic descriptions of his torture by the CIA wrote a letter calling his treatment “a stain on the moral fiber of America.”

The rebuke of the U.S. government’s treatment of Majid Khan, a suburban Baltimore high school graduate-turned-al-Qaida courier, was contained in a two-page handwritten letter urging the senior Pentagon official overseeing the war court to grant clemency. It was signed by seven of the eight members of the sentencing jury — six Army and Navy officers and a Marine, using their juror numbers.

The panel of active-duty officers was brought to Guantanamo Bay this past week to hear evidence and decide a sentence of 25 to 40 years. Deliberations began after Khan, 41, spent two hours describing in grisly detail the violence that CIA agents and operatives inflicted on him in dungeonlike conditions in prisons in Pakistan, Afghanistan and a third country, including sexual abuse and mind-numbing isolation.

“Mr. Khan was subjected to physical and psychological abuse well beyond approved enhanced interrogation techniques, instead being closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history,” according to the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The panel also responded to Khan’s claim that after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003, he told interrogators everything, but “the more I cooperated, the more I was tortured,” and so he subsequently made up lies to try to mollify his captors.

“This abuse was of no practical value in terms of intelligence, or any other tangible benefit to U.S. interests,” the letter said. “Instead, it is a stain on the moral fiber of America; the treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of U.S. personnel should be a source of shame for the U.S. government.”

In his testimony Thursday night, Khan became the first former prisoner of the CIA’s so-called black sites to publicly describe in detail the violence and cruelty that U.S. agents used to extract information after 9/11.