A detainee describes more CIA torture
Anyone who had the time to read the summary of the 6,700-page report by Senate investigators on the federal government’s programme of torturing detainees captured after the September 11 attacks knew, or at least suspected, that there was more to the sickening story. This week, a Reuters report added to those suspicions with newly declassified statements from Majid Khan, a high-value prisoner who had been affiliated with Al Qaeda, was captured in 2003 and has been held at Guantánamo Bay since 2006. Over more than seven years of conversations at Guantánamo with his lawyers from the Centre for Constitutional Rights, Khan described even more torture and abuse than is contained in the Senate report. Although the details of his account, as documented in notes by his lawyers, could not be independently confirmed, they corroborate many of the findings of the report.
Soon after his capture, Khan said, interrogators water-boarded him twice, a contention that contradicts the Central Intelligence Agency’s claim that it had already named all detainees who were subjected to that practice. (The CIA has denied that Khan was water-boarded.) As he was moved among a series of CIA-operated “black sites” over the following months, Khan told his lawyers, the torture continued. He was beaten repeatedly. He was hung naked from a wooden beam for three days, shackled and starved. He was taken down once during that time to be submerged in an ice bath. Interrogators pushed his head under the water until he thought he would drown. “I wished they had killed me,” Khan said. Khan confessed to delivering $50,000 to Qaeda operatives who used it to carry out a truck bombing in Indonesia, and to plotting with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of September 11, on various planned attacks. In 2012, Khan pleaded guilty to conspiracy, spying, murder and material support of terrorism in a deal that required him to testify against Mohammed. He faces a sentence of up to 19 years, which is set to be imposed by the military commission at Guantánamo Bay in February. But his culpability does not justify the depraved treatment he and other detainees suffered at the hands of the United States, in violation of both federal law and the international Convention Against Torture.
If the story of that treatment ever has a hope of coming out, it won’t be through the American government, which continues to hide key details of torture and abuse from the public. Rather, it will be through men like Khan and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, another Guantánamo detainee, who was recently allowed to publish a diary recounting his experiences at the camp.