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World News See other World News Articles Title: JOHN KIRIAKOU: CIA Torture Finally Rebuked, By Military Jury The sentencing hearing, and Khan’s two hours of graphic testimony, marked the first time that details of the C.I.A. torture program were laid bare in public. Guantanamo Bay Prison. (Joint Task Force Guantánamo Bay/Flickr/cc) ‘A Stain on the Moral Fiber of America’ The New York Times reported last week that a military jury at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo issued a sharp rebuke against the C.I.A.’s treatment of al-Qaeda prisoner Majid Khan, calling the Agency’s torture program “a stain on the moral fiber of America.” The jury recommended that Khan receive a 26-year sentence, the shortest possible under the court’s rules. Seven of the eight jurors—all U.S. military officers—then hand-wrote a letter to the military judge urging clemency for Khan. The sentencing hearing, and Khan’s two hours of graphic testimony, marked the first time that details of the C.I.A. torture program were laid bare in public. Khan testified that during the course of his interrogations, after he was captured in Pakistan in 2003, he told the C.I.A. “literally everything” he knew. He was truthful with the information, but “the more I told them, the more they tortured me.” Khan said that his only alternative was to make up information about threats, anything to get his interrogators to stop torturing him. When the information then didn’t pan out, Khan was tortured yet again. Camp 1 in Guantanamo Bay’s Camp Delta, 2005. (Kathleen T. Rhem. Wikimedia Commons) Khan was born in Saudi Arabia to Pakistani parents and raised in suburban Baltimore, Maryland. After his mother died in 2001 and his father sent the family back to Pakistan for an extended visit, Khan’s relatives radicalized him and he formally joined al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks. He was trained in the organization’s camps in southern Afghanistan and was made “operational” shortly thereafter. Khan confessed to delivering $50,000 from al-Qaeda to an associated extremist group in Indonesia that was used to finance the deadly 2003 bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta. Eleven people were killed and dozens more were injured. Khan also admitted to working closely with Khalid Shaikh Muhammad, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Khan said that in one case he wore a suicide vest in a failed effort in 2002 to assassinate Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. The vest, however, failed to detonate. Musharraf never knew how close al-Qaeda had come to killing him. Full Disclosure When I served as chief of C.I.A. counterterrorist operations in Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, one of my top priorities was to find and capture Majid Khan. We believed that he was particularly dangerous because he had spent almost his entire life in the United States, he spoke English like an American, his father and siblings were all American citizens, and we believed that al-Qaeda would use the handsome teenager to recruit other American citizens and green card holders into the group. My team searched literally all over Pakistan for him, but he eluded us. Finally, in late 2003, my successor found and captured him in Karachi, Pakistan. Khan was immediately turned over to a C.I.A. rendition team, which took him first to the infamous Salt Pit torture center in Afghanistan and then to a series of secret C.I.A. prisons around the world. He finally arrived in Guantanamo in 2006, where he has remained ever since. There was no doubt, at least in my mind, that Majid Khan was a very bad young man. He was a terrorist and a murderer, and he meant continued harm to Americans everywhere. But he didn’t deserve—nobody deserved—the treatment that he received at the hands of the C.I.A. Hose in Rectum Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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