"I wished they had killed me," detainee Majid Khan told lawyers of abuse he suffered at the hands of the CIA at Guantanamo Bay, per Reuters. The mistreatment that the former Maryland resident says he endured went beyond the methods described in the Senate's December report: According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit representing Khan, brutal techniques included dumping ice water on his genitals, sexually assaulting him with enemas, hanging him from a wooden beam for three days, and keeping him in a completely dark, bug-infested cell for nearly a year, with only a bucket for a toilet, the AP reports. Khan's accounts were compiled by his lawyers over seven years into a 27-page document and declassified by the US government last month.
Khan is to be sentenced in February on charges of conspiracy, murder, and attempted murder for assisting al-Qaeda. He has taken a plea deal with the government, with a possible sentence of 19 to 25 years instead of life in prison, but his attorney wants a more lenient sentence based on his torture allegations—especially since Khan had agreed to cooperate before what Dixon calls "gratuitous" torture. "I lived in anxiety every moment of every single day about the fear and anticipation of the unknown," Khan says, adding that he suffered panic attacks, nightmares, and hallucinations, Reuters notes. The most brutal abuse reportedly only let up once the Detainee Treatment Act passed in 2005. CIA officials have not yet commented on Khan's allegations. (More CIA stories.)
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