By Peter Foster, Washington
The CIA’s use of torture was far more “brutal and sadistic” than was disclosed in last year’s controversial US Senate report into the agency’s interrogation techniques, according to new information from a Guantanamo Bay detainee.
The newly declassified accounts of the torture of Majid Khan, a so-called “high value detainee”, describe in graphic detail how he was sexually assaulted, hung from a beam for several days without a break and half-drowned in tubs of freezing water.
The descriptions are contained in 27 pages of notes from interviews between Mr Khan and his legal team that were cleared for release by the US government on Tuesday, and first reported by Reuters.
The notes appear to corroborate a Telegraph report from September last year in which a highly-placed intelligence source alleged that CIA waterboarding went far beyond the controlled ‘simulated’ drowning known as ‘waterboarding’.
In the new testimony, Mr Khan, who was arrested in Karachi in 2003 and held for more than three years in CIA black sites before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006, is described undergoing the near-drownings during an interrogation in May 2003
“Guards and interrogators brought him into a bathroom with a tub. The tub was filled with water and ice. Shackled and hooded, they placed Khan feet-first into the freezing water and ice,” the excerpt said, “They lowered his entire body into the water and held him down, face-up in the water. An interrogator forced Khan’s head under the water until he thought he would drown.”
Last year an intelligence source provided a very similar description of CIA excesses against an unnamed detainee, telling The Telegraph: “They weren’t just pouring water over their heads or over a cloth. They were holding them under water until the point of death, with a doctor present to make sure they did not go too far. This was real torture.”
The source added that doctors were also present during the near-death interrogations to ensure there was not a fatality – a fact corroborated by Mr Khan – who says he begged one doctor for help but the doctor instead instructed
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