The CIA’s abuses under its “enhanced interrogations” program included practices beyond those known to the public, according to a former detainee at Guantanamo Bay who has turned into a cooperating witness for the government.
Majid Khan claimed that interrogators poured ice water on his genitals, twice recorded video of him naked and repeatedly touched his “private parts,” according to documents obtained by Reuters and published on Tuesday.
{mosads}Additionally, the 35-year-old Pakistani man claimed that CIA officials — some of whom smelled like alcohol, he said — threatened to beat him with a hammer, baseball bats and other tools.
The practices go beyond the abuses detailed by a controversial Senate report last year, and threaten to reignite the furor over the CIA’s use of the harsh interrogation practices during the Bush administration, which have widely been called torture.
“I wished they had killed me,” Khan told his lawyers, according to Reuters.
“I lived in anxiety every moment of every single day about the fear and anticipation of the unknown,” he added. “Sometimes, I was struggling and drowning under water, or driving a car and I could not stop.”
Khan’s details about the interrogations are contained in 27 pages of interview notes compiled by his lawyers over the last seven years. They are the first published account of the Bush administration interrogation practices from someone the U.S. considers a “high-value detainee.”
Khan is currently awaiting a formal sentence of up to 19 years in prison after pleading guilty in 2012 to charges related to murder and conspiracy. His prison term was reduced in exchange for his agreement to serve as a government witness.
He has confessed to delivering $50,000 to al Qaeda operatives in Indonesia, which was used to carry out a bombing that killed 11 people. He also admitted to plotting to poison water supplies, blow up gas stations and work as a “sleeper” al Qaeda agent in the U.S.
He was captured and held at a CIA secret prison from 2003 to 2006.
The report from Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee released last December showed that CIA officials had forcibly fed him and hydrated him rectally, among other practices. His lawyers called those practices rape.
The watershed Senate report accused the CIA of carrying out brutal practices such as waterboarding and rectal rehydration that were ineffective at obtaining valuable information. It also claimed that top CIA leaders had misled their overseers on Capitol Hill and at the White House throughout the process.