Information from Unclassified, Redacted Notes Taken by Attorneys in Meetings with Majid Khan

Center for Constitutional Rights
December 2007

Below is information taken from recently declassified notes from [November 2007] meetings between CCR attorneys Gitanjali Gutierrez and Wells Dixon and Majid Khan in the first round of meetings between a detained former CIA ghost detainee and counsel. More than 70 pages of memos prepared in a secure facility based on top secret classified notes have been stamped “top secret/code word,” and will only see the light of day if CCR successfully challenges the government’s abuse of its classification authority. Counsel is returning to Guantanamo December 8 [2007] for further meetings.

Majid chewed through the artery in his left arm until it bled last January [i.e. January 2007] and still has a scar.^[1]

Majid has been on hunger strikes to protest for his rights to see his lawyers and to protest his conditions and being kept in isolation. Hunger strikes were the only way he knew how to assert his rights. One of his teachers at Owings Mills High School in Baltimore taught him about checks and balances, and he learned that if you do not assert and protect your rights, you do not deserve to be in the United States.

Majid also went on hunger strike to get The Washington Post.

Majid is able to communicate with Abu Zubaydah in Guantánamo.

Majid lives in Camp 7.

Majid meets with his attorneys in Camp Echo II. There is something like a ranch house in the center quadrangle of Camp Echo II. Camp Echo II is a large square yard with wooden huts along the perimeter that appears dustier, dirtier and less frequently used than Camp Echo. The attorneys were initially angry because they thought perhaps the guards had brought the wrong detainee in to meet with them, which has happened in the past—Majid has lost so much weight that they did not recognize him from the photos and video they had seen; he was painfully thin and pale. He immediately looked at them and said, “Dixon? Gita? I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you. It’s good to see you.”

He is suffering from symptoms of PTSD – concentration, memory lost, frantic expression, etc.

He requested books and a subscription to The Washington Post.

He wishes he had gone to college.

Get original here.

1. An incident of this very type has been recounted by a guard to his therapist.