A Guantanamo Prisoner has given the first account of CIA abuse A Guantanamo Bay prisoner who went through a U.S. government interrogation program described it openly for the first time Thursday, saying he was left terrified and hallucinating from techniques that the CIA long sought to keep secret. Majid Khan, a former resident of the Baltimore suburbs who became an al-Qaida courier, told jurors considering his sentence for war crimes how he was subjected to days of painful abuse in the clandestine CIA facilities known as "black sites", as interrogators pressed him for information. It was the first time any of the so-called high value detainees held at the U.S. base in Cuba have been able to testify about what the U.S has euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation" but has been widely condemned as torture. "I thought I was going to die," he said. Khan spoke of being suspended naked from a ceiling beam for long periods, doused repeatedly with ice water to keep him awake for days. He described having his head held under water to the point of near drowning, only to have water poured into his nose and mouth when the interrogators let him up. He was beaten, given forced enemas, sexually assaulted and starved in overseas prisons whose locations were not disclosed. "I would beg them to stop and swear to them that I didn’t know anything," he said. "If I had intelligence to give I would have given it already but I didn’t have anything to give." "The more I cooperated and told them, the more I was tortured," he said. Khan, reading from a 39-page statement, spoke on the first day in what is expected to be a two-day sentencing hearing at the U.S. base in Cuba. A panel of military officers selected by a Pentagon legal official known as a convening authority can sentence Khan to between 25 and 40 years in prison, but he will serve far less because of his extensive cooperation with U.S. authorities. Under a plea deal, which the jurors were not told about, Khan's sentence by the jury will be reduced to no more than 11 years by the convening authority, and he will get credit for his time in custody since his February 2012 guilty plea. That means he should be released early next year, resettled in a third, as yet unknown, country because he can't return to Pakistan, where he has citizenship. Some of Khan’s treatment is detailed in a Senate Intelligence Committee report, released in 2014, that accused the CIA of inflicting pain and suffering on al-Qaida prisoners far beyond its legal boundaries and deceiving the nation with narratives of useful interrogations unsubstantiated by its own records. He spent about three years in CIA black sites before he was taken to Guantanamo in September 2006. He said he never saw the light of day in the black sites and had no contact with anyone other than guards and interrogators from his capture until his sixth year at the detention center on the base in Cuba. Khan, 41, has admitted to being a courier for al-Qaida and taking part in the planning of several plots there were never carried out. He pleaded guilty in February 2012 to charges that include conspiracy, murder and providing material support to terrorism in a deal that capped his sentence in exchange for cooperating with authorities in other investigations, including the case against the five men held at Guantanamo who are charged with planning and providing logistical support for the September 11 attack. A citizen of Pakistan who was born in Saudi Arabia, Khan came to the U.S. with his family in the 1990s and they were granted asylum. He graduated from high school in the Baltimore suburbs and held a technology job in the D.C. area at an office where he could see the smoke billowing from the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001. He says he turned to radical ideology following the death earlier that year of his mother, whom he described as the most important person in his life. Prisoner gives a Guantanamo court the first account of CIA abuse : NPR So his testimony is being used to convict other people? Can we really trust the testimony of someone that was extracted through torture or that was given to try to get a reduced prison sentence? There a few issues with that. Oh, and I also take issue with the jury not even being informed about the plea agreement. My personal feeling on this: Some of these guys probably did deserve a little suffering and light torture. But we should not overgeneralize and say that all of them did, or deserved equal amounts of that torture. Did this "enhanced interrogation" cross the line into uncivilized torture and cruelty? Was all of this torture even necessary?
This is how there could be the possibility for injustice. This comes from the Washington Times: Jurors, called panel members, will be instructed to determine a sentence between 25 and 40 years before the proceedings conclude on Friday. But the jury sentence will have little practical effect since, as part of a revised plea agreement, the government has committed to releasing Khan between 11 and 14 years from the date of his 2012 deal. So he pleads guilty in front of a jury. Those jurors decide a length of prison sentence, but those jurors do not know that the reason he pled guilty may have been because he was offered a deal to avoid that punishment if he was found guilty. His sentence is reduced, under the plea agreement, to far less time than the jury decided. And so now if he doesn't comply, or really for any reason, the court could just withdraw their reduced sentence and make him face what the jury sentenced him to. To me, from my perspective, this draws into question whether the use of jury sentencing is even valid in this situation. (I do realize that in normal criminal cases, the prison sentence of the accused is not even decided by the jury, but the practice in this case seems to add a false legitimacy)
