WASHINGTON (Middle East Eye) – A Pakistani held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba told a sentencing jury how he was raped, beaten and waterboarded by CIA interrogators in the first-ever public account of torture by someone detained in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
Majid Khan was sentenced to 26 years in prison by the jury Friday afternoon after he pleaded guilty to helping in Al-Qaeda plots in 2002, according to a spokesman for the military commissions at Guantanamo.
Based on an earlier plea deal, he could be freed as early as next year, after spending 19 years in U.S. custody.
The sentence came after his excruciating account on Thursday of being submitted to three years of CIA abuse -- testimony never before allowed in the military commissions.
Khan was allowed to tell his story as a part of his plea deal, agreeing not to divulge classified information.
He told the court of being held for days partially suspended by chains, without food or clothing, in dark cells while loud music blasted and guards doused him with ice water.
In CIA dark sites in unidentified countries, he said, he was placed hooded in a bathtub filled with ice water and had his head held under water.
From the first days of his capture in Karachi on March 5, 2003, Khan said he admitted to interrogators that he had worked with Al-Qaeda and provided them with information on the group.
“Whenever I was being tortured, I told them what I thought they wanted to hear. I lied just to make the abuse stop,” he said in the 39-page statement that was posted online afterward by his lawyers.
But, he said, “the more I cooperated and told them, the more I was tortured.”
The torture went on over three years.
He was chained to chairs or floors for days on end. Interrogators threatened to harm his family in the United States and to rape his sister.
His glasses, without which he said he was effectively blind, were broken early on and he didn’t get a new pair for almost three years.
Days of sleep deprivation left him in a daze. “I remember hallucinating, seeing a cow, and giant lizard. I lost my grip on reality,” he said.
The worst part of his ordeal, he said, were repeated enemas and anal force-feedings that left him permanently injured.
At one point, he said, a green garden hose was forced into his rectum, ostensibly to rehydrate him.
“I was raped by the CIA medics,” he said.
Khan, who grew up in Pakistan and moved to the United States at the age of 16 when he attended high school in Baltimore, said his decision to help Al-Qaeda was poor judgment.
“I’m not the young, impressionable, vulnerable kid I was 20 years ago,” he told the court Thursday. “I reject al-Qaeda, I reject terrorism.”