CIA abuse was ‘closer to torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history,’ says military jury
Seven senior U.S. military officers who sentenced a terrorist to 26 years in prison last week after hearing graphic descriptions of his torture by the C.I.A. wrote a letter calling his treatment “a stain on the moral fiber of America.”
The rebuke of the U.S. government’s treatment of Majid Khan, a suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned Qaeda courier, was contained in a two-page handwritten letter urging the senior Pentagon official overseeing the war court to grant clemency. It was signed by seven of the eight members of the sentencing jury — six Army and Navy officers and a Marine, using their juror numbers.
The panel of active-duty officers was brought to Guantánamo Bay last week to hear evidence and decide a sentence of 25 to 40 years. Deliberations began after Mr. Khan spent two hours describing in grisly detail the violence that C.I.A. agents and operatives inflicted on him in dungeonlike conditions in prisons in Pakistan, Afghanistan and a third country, including sexual abuse and mind-numbing isolation, often in the dark while he was nude and shackled.
“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,” according to the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. [Continue reading…]