We Now Have a First Person Account

Majid Khan, who graduated from Owings Mills High School just down the road from me, went to work for al Qaeda, was captured by the CIA, and tortured, and now at his sentencing hearing, he has revealed in chilling detail his barbaric and cruel treatment at the hands of the US State Security Apparatus.

He has given this statement at his sentencing hearing, and even though the authorities have limited some of the details, this has been something that the government has actively tried to suppress for much of the of his confinement, largely as a part of Barack Obama's whole, "Look forward, not back," bullsh%$.

We really need to hold those who did this accountable, and we need to hold those who prevented accountability accountable as well:

A suburban Baltimore high school graduate turned Al Qaeda courier, speaking to a military jury for the first time, gave a detailed account this week of the brutal forced feedings, crude waterboarding and other physical and sexual abuse he endured during his 2003 to 2006 detention in the C.I.A.’s overseas prison network.

Appearing in open court, Majid Khan, 41, became the first former prisoner of the black sites to openly describe, anywhere, the violent and cruel “enhanced interrogation techniques” that agents used to extract information and confessions from terrorism suspects.

He spoke about dungeonlike conditions, humiliating stretches of nudity with only a hood on his head, sometimes while his arms were chained in ways that made sleep impossible, and being intentionally nearly drowned in icy cold water in tubs at two sites, once while a C.I.A. interrogator counted down from 10 before water was poured into his nose and mouth.

Soon after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003, Mr. Khan said, he cooperated with his captors, telling them everything he knew, with the hope of release. “Instead, the more I cooperated, the more I was tortured,” he said.

So, like other victims of torture, he said he manufactured tales that his captors wanted to hear: “I lied just to make the abuse stop.”

Mr. Khan offered the dark accounting Thursday evening to a jury of eight U.S. military officers who on Friday deliberated for less than three hours and sentenced him to 26 years in prison, starting from his guilty plea in February 2012.

………

In court on Thursday, Mr. Khan read from a carefully worded 39-page account that did not identify C.I.A. agents or the countries and foreign intelligence agencies that had a role in his secret detention at black sites — information that is protected at the national security court. He expressed remorse for hurting people through his embrace of radical Islam and Al Qaeda, but also found a way around a labyrinth of U.S. intelligence classifications to realize a decade-long ambition to tell the world what U.S. agents had done to him.

The remaining details are at the article, and they are painful to read.

Imagine how painful they were for him to be subject to this barbarity.

None of the people who did this will ever face criminal charges for what they did, and in fact have been promoted and profited from their behavior.  This is an abomination.