A former Al-Qaeda courier is speaking out against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) claiming that officials conducted brutal forced feedings, crude waterboarding, and other physical and sexual abuse during interrogations.
The victim, identified as 41-year-old Majid Khan, gave a detailed account while speaking to a military jury this week. The man said he endured the horrific actions during his detention from 2003 to 2006 in the CIA's overseas prison network.
CIA Torture Techniques
Due to Khan's claims, he has become the first former prisoner of the black sites to openly describe, anywhere, the alleged violent and cruel "enhanced interrogation techniques" used by CIA agents to extract information and confessions from terrorism suspects.
Khan said he lived in dungeon-like conditions and suffered humiliating stretches of nudity, wearing only a hood on his head. He added that he would sometimes have his arms chained in ways that made it impossible for him to sleep and that agents intentionally nearly drowned him in icy cold water in tubs at two different sites.
After he was captured in March 2003 while in Pakistan, he immediately cooperated with his captors, confessing about everything he knew in the hopes that he would be released afterward. Instead, the victim said that the more he cooperated with officials, the more they tortured him, the New York Times reported.
During the testimony, Khan said he felt like he was going to die while he was in the custody of the CIA. He noted that he was also suspended from a ceiling beam for long periods while being naked. Agents allegedly kept him awake for days by dousing him in icy cold water.
Khan added that during the three years that he was interrogated, CIA agents beat him, gave him forced enemas, sexually assaulted him, and starved him of food. In September 2006, authorities transferred him to the U.S. military detention center in Cuba.
"I would beg them to stop and swear to them that I didn't know anything. If I had intelligence to give I would have given it already but I didn't have anything to give," Khan said of his suffering at the hands of CIA agents, Aljazeera reported.
Horrifying Living Conditions
The former detainee added that CIA agents allegedly pumped water into his rectum using a "green garden hose" when he refused orders to drink. He detailed the encounter as one agent connecting one end to the faucet and the other in his rectum. Due to the torture techniques, Khan said he began hallucinating and saw a cow and a giant lizard charge at him inside his cell.
On Friday, a jury will deliberate on his official sentence but it was reported that an agreed plea deal could lead to Khan being released from detention as early as February, the Daily Beast reported.
Khan gave his testimony for three hours in front of a jury of eight U.S. military officers who sentenced him to 26 years in prison that began from his guilty plea in February 2012. The victim's sentence was shortened because of a deal that was reached after he became a government cooperator.
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