Majid Khan, a man from the US state of Maryland, described in open court details of the torture he was subject to at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, becoming the first person to openly testify about the abuse in the US facility.
Khan was sentenced to 26 years by a military jury after he admitted joining al-Qaida.
The sentencing of Majid Khan is the culmination of the first trial by military commission for one of the 14 so-called high-value detainees who were sent to the US naval base in Cuba in 2006 after being held in a clandestine network of overseas CIA detention facilities and subjected to the harsh interrogation program developed in response to the 9/11 attacks.
Khan said he was left terrified and hallucinating from the techniques that the CIA deployed. "I thought I was going to die," he told the jury in his statement.
He spoke of being suspended naked from a ceiling beam for long periods, doused with ice water to keep him awake. He was repeatedly beaten, given forced enemas, sexually assaulted and starved in various CIA “black sites”.
A 2018 photo of Majid Khan | AP
“The more I cooperated and told them, the more I was tortured,” said Khan. “I would beg them to stop and swear to them that I didn’t know anything…. If I had intelligence to give I would have given it already but I didn’t have anything to give.”
Khan, a 41-year-old citizen of Pakistan who came to the US in the 1990s and graduated from high school near Baltimore, pleaded guilty to war crimes charges that included conspiracy and murder for his involvement in al-Qaida plots such as the deadly bombing of the JW Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, in August 2003.
He apologised for his actions, which included planning al-Qaida attacks in the US after 9/11 and a failed plot to kill former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. During a two-hour statement to jurors on Thursday, he said: “I did it all, no excuse. And I am very sorry to everyone I have hurt."
Khan spent three years in CIA black sites before being moved to Guantanamo in 2006. He said he never saw the light of day in any of the back sites, and had no contact with anyone except the guards and interrogators until the sixth year of his detention at the Cuba base.
- With inputs from PTI
