Is This Justice? After 18 Years of Torture, Isolation and Unprecedented Co-Operation, CIA and Guantánamo Prisoner Majid Khan Should Be Released in Feb. 2022

Majid Khan, photographed as a student in 1999, and in recent years at Guantánamo.Please support my work as a reader-funded journalist! I’m currently trying to raise $2500 (£2000) to support my writing and campaigning on Guantánamo and related issues over the next three months. If you can help, please click on the button below to donate via PayPal.

 

On Thursday evening, in a military courtroom at Guantánamo Bay, Majid Khan, a Pakistani national who was held and tortured in CIA “black sites” for three years and four months after his initial capture in Pakistan in March 2003, and has been held at Guantánamo since September 2006, was finally allowed to tell the world the gruesome details about his treatment in the “black site” program, and at Guantánamo, in a statement that he read out at a sentencing hearing.

Some of the details of the torture to which Khan was subjected were made public nearly seven years ago, when the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report about the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was made public — in particular, the shocking revelation that he was one of several prisoners subjected to “rectal feeding,” whereby, as the report described it, his “‘lunch tray,’ consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins was ‘pureed’ and rectally infused.”

In his sentencing statement, however, which, as his lawyers at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights explain, made him “the first so-called ‘high-value detainee’ at Guantánamo who has been able to speak publicly about the CIA torture program,” he revealed much more than was ever previously known publicly. As Vince Warren, CCR’s Executive Director, said, “We knew about some of the horrors he was subjected to, like the so-called ‘rectal feeding,’ from the Senate torture report, but the new details in his own words were chilling. From the ice-bath waterboardings to the ‘Torture Doctor’ who put hot sauce on the tip of his IV, the acts committed by our government shock the conscience — yet no one has ever been held accountable.”

Khan’s entire statement is available here, and it does indeed shed new light on the horrors of the torture program, but it is also a compelling account of how a young man, distraught at the death of his mother, was opportunistically targeted for recruitment by Al-Qaeda members in Pakistan, and ended up involved in plotting terrorist attacks (albeit ones that never materialized) and couriering money from Pakistan to Thailand, before his capture at his home in Karachi in March 2003.

Also compelling is Khan’s remorse for his actions. From the very beginning of his imprisonment, he told his captors the truth, but as he explained, “the more I cooperated and told them, the more I was tortured” — a shocking but unsurprising failure on the part of his interrogators to be able to ascertain when they were being told the truth, but one that has, sadly, been endemic in the “war on terror.”

It took until October 2007, when he was finally allowed to meet his lawyers, for the first steps to be taken towards the plea deal that he agreed to in his military commission trial in February 2012, which I wrote about here. In his statement, he described how, on meeting his lawyers for the first time, “I communicated to them that I would be willing to tell the truth and cooperate … to make things right. I made a decision early on that I was going to take responsibility for what I had done. I wasn’t going to let Guantánamo be the last chapter written in my life.”

As he proceeded to explain, “It took almost two years, before negotiations commenced regarding a plea deal in exchange for my cooperation”, but, finally, “On February 29, 2012, I pled guilty to all of the crimes that I was guilty of. Pleading guilty and deciding to cooperate with the U.S. Government was a very good decision. I have never doubted this decision and I remain steadfast in my commitment to assist the U.S. Government in any way that I can.”

In return for his assistance, which has involved him “cooperat[ing] with the U.S. authorities to include Prosecutors and Investigators, both for Commissions Cases and for federal, civil and criminal cases,” Khan has, unfortunately, had to endure long years of solitary confinement in Guantánamo, to add to his long years of solitary confinement in the CIA “black sites.” As he explained, “I have been essentially alone for almost a decade. I have no one to talk to with the exception of the occasional friendly guards, the FBI, and the occasional bird, iguanas, and cats that show up to visit me,” as well one particular senior military officer who “spent a lot of time talking with me, [and] mentoring me,” and who “was instrumental in my decision to cooperate.”

The pay off, however, is the promise of his imminent release. As I explained at the time of his plea deal, his “sentence will reportedly be capped at 19 years” from the time of his capture. In the intervening years, he unfortunately has had to wait for his sentencing as “prosecutors and defense lawyers clashed in court filings over who would be called to testify about Mr. Khan’s abuse in CIA custody, as the New York Times described it, adding that, “In exchange for the reduced sentence, Mr. Khan and his legal team agreed to drop their effort to call witnesses to testify about his torture, much of it most likely classified, as long as he could tell his story to the jury.”

Publicizing his statement, CCR explained that now, finally, “As a result of his cooperation, his legal team expects that the military commission will set events in motion for Mr. Khan to be transferred from Guantánamo as soon as February 2022,” when “the Biden administration must transfer him to a third country,” having ruled out repatriating him to Pakistan.

Is this justice? 

Interestingly, seven of the eight military jurors who, after his statement, as the Times described it, “issued a sentence of 26 years, about the lowest term possible according to the instructions of the court,” don’t seem to think so. In a hand-written letter to the Convening Authority for the military commissions, Army Col. Jeffrey D. Wood of the Arkansas National Guard, they urged clemency, stating:

Mr. Khan committed serious crimes against the U.S. and partner nations. He has plead guilty to these crimes and taken responsibility for his actions. Further, he has expressed remorse for the impact of the victims and their families.

Clemency is recommended with the following justification:

Mr. Khan has been held without the basic due process under the U.S. Constitution. Specifically, he was held without charge or legal representation for nine years until 2012, and held without final sentencing until October 2021. Although designated an “alien unprivileged enemy belligerent,” and not technically afforded the rights of U.S. citizens, the complete disregard for the foundational concepts upon which the Constitution was founded is an affront to American values and concept of justice.

Mr. Khan was subjected to physical and psychological abuse well beyond approved enhanced interrogation techniques, instead being closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history. This abuse was of no practical value in terms of intelligence, or any other tangible benefit to U.S. interests. Instead, it is a stain on the moral fiber of America; the treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of U.S. personnel should be a source of shame for the U.S. government.

Mr. Khan committed his crimes as young man reeling from the loss of his mother. A vulnerable target for extremist recruiting, he fell to influences furthering Islamic radical philosophies, just as many others have in recent years. Now at the age of 41 with a daughter he has never seen, he is remorseful and not a threat for future extremism.

Why everyone not charged at Guantánamo must also be released

I expect that Majid Khan will be released next February, and I hope that, as soon as possible after his release, and his resettlement in an as yet unidentified third country, he will end up reunited with his family, including the daughter he has never met. However, what also needs remembering, as plans for his release get underway, is that the belated and compromised justice in his case is more than has been afforded to the men still held who have never even been charged with a crime — currently, 27 of the other 38 men still held at Guantánamo (with the rest currently charged in the military commissions, or, in one case, having been through the process and having been convicted).

13 of these 27 men have been approved for release by high-level government review processes, and yet are still held, and the 14 others have neither been charged not approved for release, and have accurately been described as Guantánamo’s “forever prisoners.” These 27 men also need releasing by February 2022, unless, yet again, as the military commission system delivers some form of justice, and as has happened only sporadically throughout Guantánamo’s long history as the commissions have secured convictions or plea deals, its workings only cast into sharp relief how prisoners clearly regarded as far less significant — or those against whom the US cannot build any kind of case — continue to be held in a fundamentally lawless manner.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and see the latest photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or here for the US, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.55).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and he also set up ‘No Social Cleansing in Lewisham’ as a focal point for resistance to estate destruction and the loss of community space in his home borough in south east London. For two months, from August to October 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody. Although the garden was violently evicted by bailiffs on October 29, 2018, and the trees were cut down on February 27, 2019, the struggle for housing justice — and against environmental destruction — continues.

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