Foreperson says military jury disgusted by CIA torture

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, CUBA >> A Navy captain who as head of a jury in a war crimes court wrote a damning letter calling the CIA’s torture of a terrorist “a stain on the moral fiber of America” said his views are typical of senior members of the U.S. military.

Capt. Scott B. Curtis, the jury foreperson, expressed his thoughts in a letter proposing clemency for prisoner Majid Khan, an alQaida recruit who pleaded guilty to terrorism and murder charges for delivering $50,000 from his native Pakistan to finance a deadly bombing in Indonesia.

But before he started writing, the eight-officer jury sentenced Khan to 26 years in prison.

On the eve of his sentencing Oct. 29, Khan, 41, offered a graphic account of the physical, sexual and psychological abuse by CIA agents and operatives inflicted on him in dungeonlike conditions in black site prisons in Pakistan, Afghanistan and a third country.

He described how he went from graduating from a suburban Baltimore high school in 1999 to becoming a courier and would-be suicide bomber for al-Qaida to, since 2012, a repentant cooperator with the U.S. government.

After the panel agreed to the sentence, Curtis said he spent about 20 minutes writing the two-page letter.

The clemency letter provided a harsh critique of the legal framework and CIA detention system that the George W. Bush administration established after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It also offered an unusually candid view of the thinking of some U.S. military officers on the use and value of torture.

In the case of Khan, his 26-year sentence was largely symbolic. When he pleaded guilty in 2012, he became a government cooperator, and the parties agreed to delay sentencing so that Khan could demonstrate that cooperation as part of a deal that would, in exchange, reduce his eventual jury sentence.

But the jury was not told about the deal.

The letter asking a senior Pentagon official to grant mercy, or clemency, to Khan was not read aloud in court.

The foreperson gave it to the bailiff, who delivered it to Maj. Michael J. Lyness, Khan’s military defense attorney.

After leaving the courtroom, panel members discovered in an internet search that Khan, even before sentencing, had a deal that could release him as soon as February, or as late as February 2025.