Prisoner gives Guantanamo court first account of CIA abuse

FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) — A Guantanamo Bay prisoner who went by way of the brutal U.S. governing administration interrogation plan following the 9/11 assaults described it overtly for the to start with time Thursday, indicating he was remaining terrified and hallucinating from techniques that the CIA prolonged sought to keep solution.

Majid Khan, a previous resident of the Baltimore suburbs who became an al-Qaida courier, advised jurors thinking about his sentence for war crimes how he was subjected to days of painful abuse in the clandestine CIA amenities recognised as “black web-sites,” as interrogators pressed him for info.

It was the initial time any of the so-known as substantial benefit detainees held at the U.S. base in Cuba have been ready to testify about what the U.S has euphemistically identified as “enhanced interrogation” but has been broadly condemned as torture.

“I assumed I was going to die,” he claimed.

Khan spoke of remaining suspended bare from a ceiling beam for long intervals, doused consistently with ice h2o to retain him awake for days. He described possessing his head held beneath drinking water to the position of in close proximity to drowning, only to have h2o poured into his nose and mouth when the interrogators allow him up. He was overwhelmed, specified compelled enemas, sexually assaulted and starved in overseas prisons whose places were not disclosed.

“I would beg them to prevent and swear to them that I didn’t know nearly anything,” he claimed. “If I experienced intelligence to give I would have presented it already but I didn’t have something to give.”

Khan, looking through from a 39-web site assertion, spoke on the initial day in what is anticipated to be a two-working day sentencing listening to at the U.S. foundation in Cuba.

A panel of armed forces officers chosen by a Pentagon lawful formal acknowledged as a convening authority can sentence Khan to concerning 25 and 40 several years in jail, but he will serve much significantly less due to the fact of his in depth cooperation with U.S. authorities.

Below a plea offer, which the jurors were not told about, Khan’s sentence by the jury will be diminished to no more than 11 many years by the convening authority, and he will get credit for his time in custody considering the fact that his February 2012 guilty plea.

Tale proceeds

That usually means he must be launched early future year, resettled in a third, as nonetheless unidentified, state for the reason that he won’t be able to return to Pakistan, wherever he has citizenship.

Some of Khan’s treatment method is detailed in a Senate Intelligence Committee report, produced in 2014, that accused the CIA of inflicting soreness and suffering on al-Qaida prisoners significantly over and above its legal boundaries and deceiving the country with narratives of helpful interrogations unsubstantiated by its individual data.

Khan agreed with that assessment. “The extra I cooperated and explained to them, the much more I was tortured,” he claimed.

He expended about a few several years in CIA black websites just before he was taken to Guantanamo in September 2006. He said he hardly ever noticed the light-weight of working day in the black sites and experienced no get hold of with anybody other than guards and interrogators from his seize till his sixth yr at the detention middle on the base in Cuba.

Khan, 41, has admitted to remaining a courier for al-Qaida and having section in the setting up of various plots there ended up under no circumstances carried out. He pleaded guilty in February 2012 to charges that incorporate conspiracy, murder and providing product guidance to terrorism in a deal that capped his sentence in exchange for cooperating with authorities in other investigations, like the situation against the 5 guys held at Guantanamo who are billed with arranging and offering logistical assist for the Sept. 11 attack.

A citizen of Pakistan who was born in Saudi Arabia, Khan came to the U.S. with his loved ones in the 1990s and they ended up granted asylum. He graduated from high school in the Baltimore suburbs and held a technologies job in the D.C. region at an business where he could see the smoke billowing from the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

He claims he turned to radical ideology following the loss of life earlier that calendar year of his mother, whom he described as the most significant human being in his everyday living.

Khan apologized for his steps and stated he usually takes comprehensive responsibility. He claimed he now just would like to reunite with his wife and the daughter who was born even though he was in captivity. He said he has forgiven his captors, and his torturers.

“I have also experimented with to make up for the undesirable points I have performed,” he mentioned. “That is why I pleaded guilty and cooperated with the United states government”

Khan is the first of the substantial-worth detainees, individuals who went by way of the interrogation program, to be convicted and sentenced at the military tribunals held on the foundation.

The five adult males billed in the Sept. 11 attacks contain Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, who has portrayed himself as the architect of the plot. That situation stays in the pretrial stage and a choose has explained it will get started no sooner than next yr.

The U.S. holds 39 males at the detention center on Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.

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Editor’s observe: The Involved Press viewed proceedings from a movie feed at Fort Meade, Maryland.