In 2003, Khalid al-Sharif was snatched from his home in broad daylight. A high-ranking member of a Libyan group bent on toppling Muammar Gaddafi, he was living in exile in Pakistan when he was taken to a secret prison where he would spend the next two years.

“One of the officers told me, ‘I can pull out my gun now and shoot and kill you, and no one will hold me accountable,’” al-Sharif recalled. “He said, ‘Your life is in my hands. If you don’t speak, I’ll shoot you and throw you outside.’”

It wasn’t one of Gaddafi’s men who made that threat, says al-Sharif. He says it was an American working for the CIA.

As a devout Muslim with ties to an Islamic rebel group, al-Sharif says the Americans thought he might know something about Al-Qaeda. Al-Sharif was imprisoned at a CIA "black site." There, he was shackled for days at a time, subjected to around-the-clock sleep deprivation and forced into painful stress positions, even with a broken foot.

“I was hung from the ceiling and left hanging for three or four days while standing on one foot,” he says. “I was deprived of sleep, until I feel into a hysteria-like state and was almost unconscious. We were also beaten on different parts of the body – the stomach and the back.”

Al-Sharif calls it torture. So does the U.S. Senate. And the U.S. government never even charged him with a crime.

Al-Sharif is one of 119 detainees whose stories are told in the recent Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation program. Calling him “Abu Hazim,” an assumed name he used to hide from the Libyans, the report says much of the harsh treatment al-Sharif and others experienced was never approved, nor did CIA bosses do anything to stop it.

“They also tortured us by plunging us in tubs of freezing water until we felt our bodies become like ice,” he says. “Water torture was also used when they put a cloth over our face and poured water nonstop over it until we couldn’t breathe.”