WSWS<\/a>) –\u00a0Newly-released testimony from Guantanamo Bay prisoner Majid Khan has shown that the CIA used torture practices that were \u201cfar more brutal and sadistic\u201d than even those revealed by the Senate report on torture released last year.<\/p>\nIn interviews with his attorneys first publicized in a Reuters report Tuesday, Khan described being hung from rafters for days at a time, submerged in ice water, and sexually abused by his guards and interrogators, who were frequently intoxicated with alcohol during the torture sessions.<\/p>\n
Khan\u2019s experiences were detailed in 27 pages of notes taken by a team of attorneys from the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), with whom he was able to meet only after protracted efforts by the White House to block his access to legal counsel.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe CIA has repeatedly and continuously lied about the torture program,\u201d CCR attorney Wells Dixon noted in response to the publication of portions of the notes.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs layers of secrecy have been peeled away throughout the Obama administration, we see more and more evidence of CIA savagery,\u201d Dixon said.<\/p>\n
When the torture programs were launched, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) maintained publicly that its agents used \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques,\u201d i.e., scientifically designed forms of torture \u201clite,\u201d designed to inflict mere moderate levels of suffering short of full-blown torture.<\/p>\n
During the rollout of \u201cenhanced interrogation\u201d by the Bush administration, the corporate media treated the American people to slick computer-generated demonstrations of the various \u201cstress positions,\u201d \u201cwaterboarding,\u201d etc, which presented the interrogation programs as precise methods, applied in a limited fashion for the purpose of stopping terror attacks against the US.<\/p>\n
The latest revelations from Khan make clear that at the main US prison camp, Guantanamo Bay, the reality was far closer to the scenes of medieval dungeons traditionally associated with torture in the public imagination.<\/p>\n
There is little doubt about the credibility of Khan\u2019s testimony, given that it fully corroborates the claims made last September by a CIA inside source to The Telegraph<\/em> .<\/p>\n\u201cThey got medieval on his ass, and far more so than people realize,\u201d the CIA source told the British paper last year. \u201cThey weren\u2019t just pouring water over their heads or over a cloth. They were holding them under water until the point of death, with a doctor present to make sure they did not go too far. This was real torture.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his extensive testimony, Khan paints a picture of Guantanamo as a depraved environment in which the US government\u2019s professional interrogators were given free rein to abuse and terrorize prisoners at will.<\/p>\n
Khan\u2019s description of being pulled from his cell late at night for impromptu torture sessions by guards reeking of alcohol suggests that conditions at Guantanamo have degenerated to the point that torture is being carried as a form of entertainment.<\/p>\n
The CIA maintained since 2004 that its practice of \u201cwaterboarding\u201d detainees consisted of pouring water over the faces of subjects for \u201cno more than 20 seconds.\u201d<\/p>\n
Substantiating the claims of the CIA source cited by The Telegraph<\/em> last September, Khan describes \u201cwaterboarding\u201d incidents from May and July 2003 that amounted to near drowning in ice water, providing grisly new details about what \u201cwaterboarding\u201d has actually looked like in practice.<\/p>\nAccording to his account, Khan was slowly submerged feet first in a tub of ice water, while shackled and hooded, and held underwater until the verge of drowning.<\/p>\n
\u201cKhan was forced into the tub and held down on his back, his hands were shackled underneath him and the arch of his back forced his head to tilt backwards into the water at an angle. A cloth hood remained on his face as the guards forced his body down into the tub. One of the interrogators held a bucket filled with water and large chunks of ice over his head. The interrogator poured the water and ice into Khan\u2019s mouth and nose as well as on his genitals from a high distance. As the interrogator poured the tub began to fill up. Khan could not breathe and water went into his lungs,\u201d the notes compiled by Khan\u2019s lawyers read.<\/p>\n
Such water torture sessions punctuated the several years Khan spent in solitary confinement, including being held in complete darkness continuously for much of 2003 while caged in a bare cell with an uncovered bucket for a toilet, no toilet paper, a sleeping mat and no light.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is clear that the CIA interrogators were completely out of control,\u201d Khan\u2019s lawyer said in comments to the Telegraph<\/em> this week.<\/p>\n\u201cWhat happened to men like Majid Khan is far more brutal and sadistic than has been revealed in the Senate report or any of the other prior public disclosures,\u201d he said. The torture report published by the US Senate last year only covered \u201cthe tip of the iceberg.\u201d<\/p>\n
Apparently following the advice of US government psychologists specializing in torture, interrogators issued threats against Khan\u2019s family, including his young sister, throughout his detention.<\/p>\n
Prior to his capture and rendition to a CIA black site torture camp in Afghanistan during a March 2003 visit with his wife in Pakistan, Khan was a legal US resident who attended high school and lived with family near Baltimore, Maryland, working for his father.<\/p>\n
Khan was moved to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in 2006, where he has been held since, prevented from meeting his young daughter.<\/p>\n
Khan\u2019s testimony to the CCR legal team represents a major deepening of the growing body of evidence implicating the entire US ruling class in unpardonable crimes. Major abuses reported by CCR include:<\/p>\n
* \u201cAs described in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, Khan was raped while in CIA custody (\u2018rectal feeding\u2019). He was sexually assaulted in other ways as well, including by having his \u2018private parts\u2019 touched while he was hung naked from the ceiling.\u201d<\/p>\n
* \u201cThey would come in with a bag of tools and set them down next to Majid. They would pull out a hammer and show it to Majid. One of them threatened to hammer Majid\u2019s head. They sometimes smelled like alcohol.\u201d<\/p>\n
* \u201cInterrogators and guards at a black site hung Khan by his hands from a wooden beam for three days. He was naked and shackled. He was provided with water but no food.\u201d<\/p>\n
* \u201cWhen a physician came to examine him, Khan begged for help. In response, the physician instructed the guards to take Khan back into the interrogation room with the metal bar and hang him. Khan remained hanging there for another 24 hours before being interrogated again and forced to write his own \u2018confession\u2019 while being filmed naked.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Senate report acknowledged that Khan was raped and sexually abused by his captors, including through insertion of tubes into his anus as part of the practice referred to by CIA interrogators as \u201crectal feeding,\u201d and subjected to blows against his genitals while hanging from the ceiling of an interrogation chamber.<\/p>\n
For all this, the US Senate torture report released last year acknowledged that Khan\u2019s torture never produced any intelligence of value.<\/p>\n
Khan\u2019s account represents yet another blow against protracted efforts of the US government to conceal the unbridled savagery that reigns inside its torture facilities.<\/p>\n
The Senate\u2019s torture report, for all its limited exposures, was quickly buried by the media. Despite containing significant revelations, the Senate report itself was extensively redacted under the oversight of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, undoubtedly to remove accounts of the types of brutality related by Khan.<\/p>\n
The suppression of the Senate report is the culmination of years of deception by the CIA and the executive branch to cover up the true nature and scale of the US government\u2019s torture program.<\/p>\n
In 2005, the CIA destroyed at least 90 video recordings of CIA torture sessions conducted in recent years. Jose Rodriguez, head of the CIA\u2019s covert wing, the National Clandestine Service, has since received effective legal immunity from the Obama administration. In 2010 the White House announced that the US government would not prosecute him for overseeing destruction of evidence.<\/p>\n
Barack Obama finally acknowledged that the US government organized torture on a mass scale in remarks last year. \u201cWe tortured some folks,\u201d the president said, referring to the grave violation of US and international law and crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n
Obama then proceeded to express his \u201cfull confidence\u201d in CIA Director John Brennan, a central player in the erection of the torture apparatus and in the Obama administration\u2019s drone wars. Far from being held accountable, those most directly involved in establishing the American gulag have been protected and elevated to the highest levels of the state during the Obama years.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (WSWS) –\u00a0Newly-released testimony from Guantanamo Bay prisoner Majid Khan has shown that the CIA used torture practices that were \u201cfar more brutal and sadistic\u201d than even those revealed by the Senate report on torture released last year. In interviews with his attorneys first publicized in a Reuters report Tuesday, Khan described being hung from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-157045","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157045\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=157045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=157045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}