Photo: PAUL HANDLEY / AFP / Getty Images
A suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned Al Qaeda messenger testified for the first time in front of a military jury, detailing the brutal force-feeding, drowning and other physical abuse on Thursday. and sexual disorders that he suffered during his detention between 2003 and 2006 in the CIA prison network abroad.
In public hearing, Majid Khan , of 41 years, became the first Former CIA Hideout Prisoner in openly describing the violent and cruel “enhanced interrogation techniques” that agents used to extract information and confessions from terror suspects.
For more than two hours, he talked about dungeon conditions, humiliating stretches of nakedness with only a hood on his head, sometimes while his arms were chained in a way that made sleep impossible, and from being intentionally almost drowned in tubs of ice water.
Shortly after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003 said Khan, cooperating with his captors and telling them everything he knew, hoping to be released. “The more I cooperated, the more I was tortured,” he said.
Eight US military officers were selected to serve on the jury, which will deliberate on Friday on his official sentence in the range of 25 to 40 years, from his guilty plea in February 2012.
But the sentence is largely symbolic, a requirement of the military commission.
Unbeknownst to the jurors, Khan and his lawyers reached a secret agreement this year with a senior Pentagon official in which his actual sentence could end in February and no later than February 2025 because Khan had become a government collaborator by pleading guilty.
Jurors were informed that, in 2012, Khan pleaded guilty of terrorism charges, including murder, to be delivered 50, 09 dollars from Pakistan to an Al Qaeda affiliate in early 2003.
The money was used in a deadly attack on a Marriott hotel in August 2003, although Khan said he did not know how the money would be used.
On Thursday in court, Khan read 33 carefully crafted pages where the agents were not identified of the CIA or the countries where he was tortured.
He was beaten while naked and spent long periods chained, sometimes to a wall and crouched “Like a dog”, or with his arms extended above his head and chained to a beam inside his cell.
They kept him in the dark and the They dragged him, hooded and chained, his head smashed against the floor, walls and stairs as he was transferred from one cell to another.
A doctor inserted an enema and then put him in a taped diaper to that he didn’t need a bathroom break during flights.
He described images of a cow and a giant lizard advancing towards him inside a cell while chained to a beam above his head.
He tried to kick them away but lost his balance, causing his chains to throw him .
After refusing to eat, his captors “infused” him with a puree from his lunch for the anus.
Intelligence declined Thursday to comment on the descriptions offered at the hearing, but noted that the CIA’s detention and interrogation program ended and n 2009.
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