The jury recommended that Khan receive a 26-year sentence, the shortest possible under the court\u2019s rules. Seven of the eight jurors\u2014all U.S. military officers\u2014then hand-wrote a letter to the military judge urging clemency for Khan. The sentencing hearing, and Khan\u2019s two hours of graphic testimony,\u00a0marked the first time that details of the C.I.A. torture program were laid bare in public<\/strong>.<\/p>\n 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”\u00a0he knew. He was truthful with the information, but\u00a0“the more I told them, the more they tortured me.”<\/strong>\u00a0Khan 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\u2019t pan out, Khan was tortured yet again.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s relatives radicalized him and he formally joined al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks.<\/p>\n He was trained in the organization\u2019s camps in southern Afghanistan and was made “operational”\u00a0shortly thereafter.\u00a0Khan 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.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Full Disclosure<\/strong><\/p>\n When I served as chief of C.I.A. counterterrorist operations in Pakistan after the Sept. 11 attacks,\u00a0one of my top priorities was to find and capture Majid Khan<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n 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\u00a0took him first to the infamous\u00a0Salt Pit<\/a>\u00a0torture center in Afghanistan and then to a series of secret C.I.A. prisons around the world<\/strong>. He finally arrived in Guantanamo in 2006, where he has remained ever since.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t deserve\u2014nobody deserved\u2014the treatment that he received at the hands of the C.I.A.<\/p>\n Hose in Rectum<\/strong><\/p>\n Khan testified before the tribunal that he was subjected to repeated rounds of waterboarding with ice water.\u00a0In more than one case he nearly drowned and had to be revived.<\/strong>\u00a0He was chained to an eye bolt in the ceiling of his cell so that he could not sit, kneel, lay or get comfortable for days at a time.<\/p>\n He was subjected to\u00a0sleep deprivation for as long as 12 days<\/strong>. (The American Psychological Association has\u00a0warned us<\/a>\u00a0that people begin losing their minds at seven days with no sleep. They begin dying of organ failure at nine days with no sleep.)<\/p>\n When he went on a hunger strike to protest his treatment, C.I.A. officers\u00a0pureed his food and forced it up his rectum with a tube<\/strong>. On other occasions, C.I.A. officers forced\u00a0a green garden hose up his rectum and turned on the water<\/strong>, causing incontinence and searing pain.<\/p>\n Prosecutors acknowledged Khan\u2019s “rough treatment.”\u00a0His attorney, a U.S. Army major, called what the C.I.A. did\u00a0“heinous and vile acts of torture.”<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/assets.zerohedge.com\/s3fs-public\/styles\/inline_image_mobile\/public\/inline-images\/gitmo_0.jpg?itok=-keiL3pc\")
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