GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba. A confessed al-Qaeda courier whose account of CIA torture disgusted US military juries has served his prison term, the Pentagon said Friday. Now US diplomats must find a place for him.
Majid Khan was sentenced to 26 years in prison in October, beginning when he first pleaded guilty to war crimes on February 28, 2012 for delivering $50,000 from Pakistan to a Qaeda affiliate. The money was used in the 2003 bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, which killed about a dozen people.
But the military jury also declared his torture by the United States to be “a stain on America’s moral fabric” and called for a pardon by the military court overseer.
On Friday, Jeffrey D. Wood, who is in charge of convening military commissions, did just that. He reduced the term to 10 years, that is, it ended on March 1.
In doing so, Mr. Khan became the 20th of 38 detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay for whom the United States needs to arrange for safe transfer to another country. His attorney, J. Wells Dixon, urged the Biden administration to “immediately transfer him to a safe third country.”
Mr. Khan, 42, a Pakistani citizen, went to high school in suburban Maryland, but none of those places seem like a good fit. By law, no Guantanamo detainee can be brought to the United States. His lawyers say he cannot be returned to Pakistan because when he first pleaded guilty, he became a US government witness and his life could be in danger if sent there.
“There is no reason to keep Majid Khan in Guantanamo Bay,” Mr. Dixon said. “The United States should send him to a safe third country where he can be reunited with his wife and daughter, whom he has never seen.”
Mr. Wood, a colonel in the Arkansas National Guard, was appointed to the civilian position of warden military court during the Trump administration and has broad powers to hear and dismiss cases, as well as negotiate plea agreements. In Mr. Khan’s case, last year’s agreement, which was kept secret from the jury, included a reduction in his sentence.
As part of the deal, Mr Khan was allowed to publicly address jurors in October asking for leniency. He presented a painful and lengthy account of his journey from a hipster high school graduate in suburban Maryland in the late 1990s to a Qaeda recruit in Pakistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks, followed by his disappearance on secret CIA sites. For three years.
He described cruel and humiliating treatment, including being chained crooked and naked with a hood over his head that made it impossible to sleep, nearly drowning in icy water in an impromptu submersion, and being crudely and brutally fed through tubes in his rectum and nose.
Mr. Khan’s military lawyer, Army Major Michael J. Lyness, bluntly told fellow U.S. officers to the jury that the prisoner “was raped by the U.S. government” and subjected to “heinous and heinous torture.”
Following the verdict, seven of Mr. Khan’s eight jurors wrote a letter to the convening body calling for a pardon for Mr. Khan because of what the United States had done to him.
“This abuse had no practical intelligence value or any other tangible benefit to US interests,” the letter said. “On the contrary, it is a stain on the moral order of America; Mr. Khan’s treatment by US personnel should be a source of disgrace to the US government.”
The foreman of the jury, Navy Captain Scott B. Curtis, was the only juror involved in the pardon letter who chose to state his views publicly. However, it was an exceptional rebuke to the CIA legal framework and detention system that the Bush administration had put in place in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.
When Mr. Khan told jurors about his black court experience in October, he was the first former black court inmate to do so in open court.
His testimony culminated in years of disclosure and declassification litigation to give a public account of what happened to him.
Although he was captured in 2003 in Pakistan, he was not allowed to see his lawyers, Mr. Dixon and Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, until 2007, a year after he was taken to Guantanamo Bay.
“Remembering, Majid was a scared, traumatized kid when I first met him 15 years ago,” Mr Dixon said. “He’s come a long way and we’re very proud of him.”