Category: Torture

Consortium News has published an article by the only man to be prosecuted and jailed in connection with the US-CIA torture program under George W. Bush.

The irony of John Kiriakou’s story is that he was the CIA whistleblower who exposed the agency’s illegal, inhumane torture program to the world. For

that conscientious act of bravery he was sent to prison, whereas the many men and women who engaged in torture and then worked to cover it up — well, not a single one has yet been held to account.

But, hey. This is America. What else can we expect?

For the first time, however, one of the victims of the US torture program has told his story under oath in a military courtroom. During two hours of testimony Majid Khan told his story.

Afterwards, six out of seven of the military jurors cosigned a letter condemning Khan’s mistreatment as “a stain on the moral fiber of America” and asked for clemency.

Below is an excerpt of the article entitled “A Stain on the Moral Fiber of America” (all emphasis is mine).

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. . . 

. . . Khan testified before the tribunal that he was subjected to repeated rounds of waterboarding with ice water. In more than one case he nearly drowned and had to be revived. He 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.

He was subjected to sleep deprivation for as long as 12 days. (The American Psychological Association has warned us that people begin losing their minds at seven days with no sleep. They begin dying of organ failure at nine days with no sleep.)

When he went on a hunger strike to protest his treatment, C.I.A. officers pureed his food and forced it up his rectum with a tube. On other occasions, C.I.A. officers forced a green garden hose up his rectum and turned on the water, causing incontinence and searing pain.

Prosecutors acknowledged Khan’s “rough treatment.” His attorney, a U.S. Army major, called what the C.I.A. did “heinous and vile acts of torture.”

Read the entire piece here.