GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A well-known Al-Qaida courier whose CIA torture story disgusted a US military jury has served his prison sentence, the Pentagon announced Friday. Now American diplomats must find a place for him.
Majid Khan was sentenced in October to 26 years in prison, starting from when he first pleaded guilty to war crimes on February 28, 2012, for supplying $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 12 people.
But the military jury also declared his torture at the hands of the United States “a stain on America’s moral fiber” and urged the war tribunal superintendent to pardon him.
On Friday, Jeffrey D. Wood, who serves as the convening authority for military commissions, did just that. He reduced the sentence to 10 years, meaning it ended on March 1.
By doing so, Mr Khan became the 20th of 38 detainees currently held at Guantanamo Bay for whom the United States must arrange a safe transfer to another country. His attorney, J. Wells Dixon, urged the Biden administration to “transfer him immediately to a safe third country.”
Mr Khan, 42, is a Pakistani national who attended high school in suburban Maryland, but neither place seems to be a viable option. By law, no Guantánamo detainees may 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 longer a base to hold Majid Khan at Guantanamo,” 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 met.”
Mr. Wood, a colonel in the Arkansas National Guard, was appointed to the civilian position of Warrant Court Superintendent during the Trump administration and has wide discretion to review and dismiss cases and negotiate plea deals. In Mr Khan’s case, an agreement kept secret from the jury last year promised to shorten his time in detention.
As part of the deal, Mr Khan was allowed to make a public plea for leniency to the jury in October. He gave a painful, 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 into the black sites of the CIA. for three years.
He described brutal and humiliating treatment, including being twisted and chained naked with a hood on his head, making it impossible to sleep, nearly drowning in icy water in an improvisation of waterboarding, and being roughly and cruelly fed through tubes in his rectum and nose.
Khan’s military attorney, Army Major Michael J. Lyness, bluntly told fellow officers on the jury that the prisoner had been “raped at the hands of the US government” and subjected to “horrific and despicable torture”.
After determining their sentences, seven of Mr Khan’s eight jurors wrote a letter to the convening authority urging Mr Khan for leniency because of what the United States had done to him.
“This abuse had no practical value in terms of intelligence or any other tangible benefit to American interests,” the letter said. “Instead, it is a stain on America’s moral fiber; Khan’s treatment at the hands of US personnel should be a source of disgrace to the US government.”
The jury foreman, Captain Scott B. Curtis of the Navy, was the only juror involved in the pardon who chose to make his views public. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary reproach to the CIA legal framework and detention system that the Bush administration had put in place after the September 11 attacks.
When Mr Khan described his experiences at the black locations to the jury in October, he was the first former black location inmate to do so in a public courtroom.
His testimony put an end to years of lawsuits to expose and release information in an effort to provide a public account of what happened to him.
Although he was arrested in Pakistan in 2003, he was not allowed to see his lawyers, Mr. Dixon and Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, until 2007, until a year after he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay.
“When I think back, Majid was a scared, damaged child the first time I met him 15 years ago,” said Mr. Dixon. “He has come a long way and we are very proud of him.”