The Prominence Effect and the Torture of Majid Khan
By Andrew Quist
Content warning: torture and sexual assault
At his sentencing hearing for terrorism charges at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in October, Majid Khan detailed the torture he was subjected to at a CIA black site from 2003–2006. Khan had ice water thrown on his naked body while hung from his hands on a wooden beam, was “fed” by captors inserting tubes filled with purée in his anus, had water pumped up his rectum with a garden hose, was beaten while naked, had a guard touch his private parts while he was shackled in the nude, was deprived sleep for days, and was nearly drowned in ice water.
Seven of the eight military officers acting as jurors at the sentencing hearing signed a handwritten letter to the convening authority recommending Khan be granted clemency because of his cooperation with the government and considering the torture he was subjected to. The officers wrote:
Mr. Khan was subjected to physical and psychological abuse well-beyond approved enhanced interrogation techniques, instead being closer torture performed by the most abusive regimes in modern history. This abuse was of no practical value in terms of intelligence, or any other tangible benefit to U.S. interests. Instead, it is a stain on the moral fiber of America; the treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of U.S. personnel should be a source of shame for the U.S. government.
Although the use of torture by the U.S. government ended in 2009, it is worth examining how U.S. policy became so cruel during the War on Terror after the September 11 attacks. Inflicting torture on people as a matter of policy reflects a dehumanization of perceived enemies. The prominence effect may explain how such dehumanization could occur. This effect, which has been demonstrated in numerous studies, is the tendency for people to choose the option with the most defensible value when confronted with competing objectives, in this case between human rights and national security. As Paul Slovic and Herb Lin write, “the prominence effect can be thought of as an attentional spotlight on the most inherently defensible attributes of a decision, driving those attributes to assume greater, and sometimes extreme, priority and importance in a decision maker’s thinking.”
Even though U.S. leaders like former President George W. Bush valued human rights (as demonstrated by his administration’s HIV/AIDS relief program in Africa), when choosing between national security and human rights, national security assumed an extreme priority. Speaking on CNN in January of 2009, President Bush remarked: “The most important job I have had—and the most important job the next president is going to have—is to protect the American public from another [terrorist] attack.” Prominence bias may have contributed to the decision to implement torture as a matter of policy.
Majid Kahn is the first person to publicly describe the torture he was subjected to at a CIA black site. By putting a name and face on this inhumane practice, his testimony grants us an opportunity to reflect on the human toll of the War on Terror.
You can read more about Majid Khan in the following articles in The New York Times and Just Security:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/us/politics/guantanamo-detainee-torture.html