U.S. Official Ends Sentence of Terrorist Who Was Tortured by C.I.A.

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A confessed courier for Al Qaeda whose story of torture by the C.I.A. disgusted a U.S. army jury has accomplished his jail sentence, the Pentagon introduced Friday. Now U.S. diplomats should discover a place for him to go.

Majid Khan was sentenced to 26 years in jail in October, ranging from when he first pleaded responsible to conflict crimes on Feb. 28, 2012, for delivering $50,000 from Pakistan to a Qaeda affiliate. The cash was used within the 2003 bombing of a Marriott lodge in Jakarta, Indonesia, that killed a couple of dozenpeople.

However the army jury additionally declared his torture by the US “a stain on the ethical fiber of America” and urged the conflict courtroom overseer to supply him clemency.

On Friday, Jeffrey D. Wooden, who serves because the convening authority for army commissions, did simply that. He diminished the sentence to 10 years, which means it ended on March 1.

In doing so, Mr. Khan grew to become the twentieth of the 38 detainees presently held at Guantánamo Bay for whom the US wants to rearrange secure switch to a different nation. His lawyer, J. Wells Dixon, urged the Biden administration to “switch him promptly to a secure third nation.”

Mr. Khan, 42, is a Pakistani citizen who went to highschool in suburban Maryland, however neither place seems to be a viable possibility. By legislation, no Guantánamo detainee might be taken to the US. His legal professionals say he can’t be returned to Pakistan as a result of, when he first pleaded responsible, he grew to become a U.S. authorities witness, and his life may very well be in peril have been he despatched there.

“There is no such thing as a foundation left to proceed to carry Majid Khan at Guantánamo,” Mr. Dixon stated. “America should ship him to to a secure, third nation the place he might be reunited together with his spouse and his daughter, who he by no means met.”

Mr. Wooden, a colonel within the Arkansas Nationwide Guard, was appointed to the civilian place of conflict courtroom overseer in the course of the Trump administration and has huge latitude to evaluate and dismiss instances, in addition to negotiate plea agreements. Within the case of Mr. Khan, an settlement final 12 months that was stored secret from the jury pledged to scale back his time in confinement.

As a part of the deal, Mr. Khan was permitted to make a public plea for leniency to the jury in October. He provided a painful, prolonged account of his journey from a hipster highschool graduate in suburban Maryland within the late Nineties to a Qaeda recruit in Pakistan after the Sept. 11, 2001, assaults, adopted by his disappearance into the black websites of the C.I.A. for 3 years.

He described brutal and humiliating therapy, together with being chained contorted and nude with a hood on his head, making sleep unattainable, almost drowning in icy chilly water in an improvisation of waterboarding and being roughly and cruelly fed by means of tubes in his rectum and nostril.

Mr. Khan’s army lawyer, Maj. Michael J. Lyness of the Military, bluntly instructed fellow U.S. officers on the jury that the prisoner “was raped by the hands of the U.S. authorities” and subjected to “heinous and vile acts of torture.”

After deciding their sentence, seven of Mr. Khan’s eight jurors wrote a letter to the convening authority urging clemency for Mr. Khan due to what the US had executed to him.

“This abuse was of no sensible worth when it comes to intelligence, or another tangible profit to U.S. pursuits,” the letter stated. “As an alternative, it’s a stain on the ethical fiber of America; the therapy of Mr. Khan within the fingers of U.S. personnel needs to be a supply of disgrace for the U.S. authorities.”

The jury foreman, Capt. Scott B. Curtis of the Navy, was the one juror concerned within the clemency letter who selected to state his views publicly. Nonetheless, it was a unprecedented reproach of the authorized framework and C.I.A. detention system that the Bush administration established after the Sept. 11 assaults.

When Mr. Khan described his experiences on the black websites to the jury in October, he was the primary former black web site prisoner to take action in open courtroom.

His testimony capped years of litigation to uncover and declassify info in an effort to supply a public reckoning about what occurred to him.

Though he was captured in 2003 in Pakistan, he was not allowed to see his legal professionals, Mr. Dixon and Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, till 2007, till a 12 months after he was dropped at Guantánamo Bay.

“Considering again, Majid was a scared, broken child the primary time I met him 15 years in the past,” Mr. Dixon stated. “He’s come a good distance and we’re very happy with him.”