. Majid Khan’s existence is a final repudiation of a government that turned sadism into policy

 

 

 

Jeffrey St. Clair

 

In 1996, Majid Khan moved with his family from Pakistan to Catonsville, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore. Two years later, the Khan family was granted political asylum and given permanent residence in the US. Majid graduated from nearby Owings Mills High School, worked at his dad’s gas station, dated girls, smoked pot, played video games and got a job at the telecom company that managed the Pentagon’s phone system.

 

Then in 2001 his mom died, the Towers came down and his life spiraled out of control. He moved to Pakistan, became a courier for Al Qaeda, got captured by Pakistani security, was turned over to the CIA and renditioned to a black site for what the Agency coyly called “enhanced interrogation.”

Majid was 23-years-old when he entered the black hole of the US secret detention system. He wouldn’t emerge until last month when he was released from Guantanamo and sent to Belize.

While in the custody of the CIA, Majid was berated, waterboarded, physically and sexually abused, subjected to sleep deprivation and humiliation, starved and force fed, isolated, denied the opportunity to pray, and inflicted with rectal hydrations that his attorneys at the Center for Constitutional Rights called “anal rapes.”

 

This torture, there’s no other word for it, went on for years, long after Majid posed any kind of threat to anyone but himself. Why? Majid says he told his interrogators the truth from the beginning, anxious to get what he knew off his chest. He answered their questions, told the interrogators how he’d been recruited largely through GTMO videos, and described how he transported the money used to fund the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta in August 2003.

 

None of these admissions satisfied his torturers. With each session, the abuse only escalated. “The more I cooperated, the more I was tortured,” Majid later said at his tribunal.

 

Majid was held in a dark cell, under dungeon-like conditions. He was stripped and kept naked for weeks at a time. He was often shackled, his arms twisted and chained. He would be doused with icy water and left shivering in his cell, blanketless. He was repeatedly waterboarded, nearly to the point of drowning.

To stop the torture, Khan began to invent stories, more and more fanciful, that he thought might satisfy his torturers. “I lied to make the abuse stop,” he said.

 

But the abuse didn’t stop. When the interrogators ran out of questions, they put Majid into isolation. He reached a breaking point and went on a hunger strike to protest the inhumane conditions at the black site, they began to force feed him. First by placing plastic tubes up his nose and down his throat so that they could pump liquid into his stomach. When Majid bit off the tubes, his torturers switched to a new, more aggressive technique “without unnecessary conversation.” Translation: Rectal feeding without consent. Majid’s daily lunch menu of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was pureed and infused up his anus. This was followed by infusions of Ensure, at least twice a day, for weeks at a time.

Over the course of his detention, Majid was moved from one secret prison to another. Before one rendition flight, Majid was given an enema and then placed in a diaper that was duct-taped to his body so that his guards wouldn’t have to take him to the bathroom. His eyes were also duct-taped shut and his eye-lashes and brows ripped out when the tape was torn off.

 

The torture exacted its toll, physically and psychologically. Majid developed chronic hemorrhoids, anal fissures and a prolapsed rectum. He slipped into depression. He was wracked with nightmares and hallucinations.

 

For years, Majid was kept in a perilous state that not even Kafka could dramatize. He was tortured when he refused to eat. He was tortured when he refused to drink. He was tortured when he struggled to survive and when he wanted to die. Majid attempted suicide six times. He sliced his wrists twice. He cut a vein in his foot. He jabbed a filed toothbrush into his arm. He tried to bite through a vein in his elbow.

The medics patched him up and sent him back into conditions that would make anyone contemplate suicide. They saved his life against his will so that they could take him to the brink of death, again and again.

 

Majid wasn’t tortured for information. He wasn’t tortured for names or account numbers. He’d long ago surrendered, willingly, all he knew. Majid Khan was tortured for behavior control. Whatever that behavior was. He was tortured when he complied and when he resisted. He was tortured for asserting any act of self-will. The point–if by the end there was a point beyond sating the power lust of his torturers–was to annihilate his personality, his own sense of himself. But here the CIA failed.

When Majid stepped off the plane that took him from the moral darkness of Gitmo to Belize, he was not a broken man. He was older. He had less hair. His body and mind were scarred. But he was fully aware of where he’d been, what he’d been through and who put him through it. Few have endured what Majid endured. Even fewer have survived to describe their torture to the agencies that inflicted it. Majid Khan’s existence is a final repudiation of a government that turned sadism into policy.

 

COUNTERPUNCH