Majid Khan (Guantanamo detainee)

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There are multiple individuals named Majid Khan.

Majid Khan is a Pakistan born man whose family emigrated to the United States in 1996.^[1] Khan attended Owings Mills High School, in Owing Mills, Maryland, graduating in 1999.^[2] Khan returned to Pakistan in early 2002, where he married his wife Rubia, and fathered a child. Khan was secretly captured in 2003, and held in extrajudicial detention in the CIA's controversial covert system of overseas interrogation centres.

1 Capture and final acknowledgement and transfer to Guantanamo
2 Early life
3 Covert detention
4 Legal challenges
5 References

[edit] Capture and final acknowledgement and transfer to Guantanamo

The Washington Post reports that Khan's family had no idea what had happened to Khan until President Bush acknowledged the CIA's black sites.^[1] Bush announced that Khan and thirteen other "high-profile detainees" would be transferred from CIA custody to military custody at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.

[edit] Early life

Khan worked at a gas station his family owned. And this played a role in the suspicions of U.S. intelligence analysts that Khan was part of a plot to blow up parts of the U.S. petroleum infrastructure.^[1]^[2]

[edit] Covert detention

Uzair Paracha, the son of Saifullah Paracha, another Guantanamo detainee, stood trial, and was convicted of terrorism charges in a U.S. court for a role in this plot. Paracha had requested Majid Khan as a witness. The U.S. government declined to produce him, even though he was in U.S. custody.^[2]^[3]

[edit] Legal challenges

Khan was the first of fourteen detainees transferred from the CIA'a black-sites to military custody at Guantanamo to challenge the legality of his detention.^[4] The Center for Constitutional Rights filed the challenge on October 5, 2006 -- before US President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 into law.^[5] The Military Commissions Act of 2006 disallows detainees from mounting challenges through US courts. The act is retroactive. The Center for Constitutional Rights plans to appeal the acts provisions all the way to the US Supreme Court.

Khan's appeal points out that even though he has been in US custody for over three and a half years, he has never had any kind of review of the legality of his detention.^[5]

According to the Christian Science Monitor, Khan's appeal alleges that he was was tortured, subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and was coerced into making false and unreliable confessions.^[5]

On November 4 2006, the Justice Department said that Khan should not be allowed to speak to an attorney because he might "reveal the agency's closely guarded interrogation techniques".^[6]

James Friedman, a professor at the Maine School of Law, wrote that the Bush administration is arguing that Khan, and the other high-value detainees held in the Black Sites, should be gagged from talking about the interrogation techniques they were exposed to, even when talking privately to their own lawyers.^[7] Friedman pointed out, "His combatant status was never reviewed as required by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) nor as outlined in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005."