Thread by @carolrosenberg

For the first time in public, a detainee has been allowed to describes his torture in more than three years of C.I.A. black site custody. It was graphic, unclassified and offered new, never before disclosed details.
My dispatch from Guantanamo Bay...
nytimes.com/2021/10/28/us/…

Mr. Khan, who joined al Qaeda after the 9/11 attacks, expressed remorse for hurting people through his embrace of violence — and also found a way through a maze of national security classifications to realize a decade-long ambition to tell the world what the CIA had done to him.

Mr. Khan juxtaposed his remarks of contrition with previously unheard details of his torture by agents of the United States— the country his Pakistani-American parents and siblings adopted by becoming citizens even as he did not.

Mr. Khan’s father, Ali, wept as his son described his abuse, at times hiding his head in his hands, while the prisoner’s sister, also tearful, tried to comfort her father. The jury of eight U.S. military officers, (Army, Navy and Marine) watched soberly, but displayed no emotion.

The CIA declined to comment on the prisoner’s descriptions of the intelligence agency’s black sites but noted that its post-9/11 detention and interrogation program ended in 2009.

Here’s your @Twitter extra, not included in the article for space: Before Mr. Khan read his unclassified, 39-page account, after dinner last night, an unnamed intelligence interest suddenly sent word from somewhere that it considered a cleared paragraph to be classified.

The trial’s Air Force judge, Colonel Mark W. Milam, would have none of it. He said he did not like last-minute surprises. He added that the passage of concern came from a public source, suggesting it was one of those TMI mosaic claims.
He ruled Mr. Khan he could read every word.

The lead prosecutor, Army Colonel Walter Foster IV, reminded that intelligence stakeholders had real-time access to the court, might signal to halt the hearing in the event of a suspected spill.

Mr. Khan read the entire statement.
Nobody interrupted.

Here’s an article I wrote that explains how U.S. intelligence interests, listening somewhere else, can reach in to silence the court at Guantánamo Bay. A military judge in the 9/11 case secretly granted the authority. Defense lawyers discovered it.

nytimes.com/2020/04/04/us/…

For one brutal transfer, he said, guards used duct tape to blindfold him. Once in his new cell, he found peeling the tape off his face “especially painful because it ripped off my eyebrows and eyelashes.”