Former Guantánamo Bay prisoner has big dreams for a new life in Belize

On his first day of freedom, former Guantánamo Bay prisoner Majid Khan prayed without anyone watching him for the first time in two decades.

He ate a lunch of fresh fish from the Caribbean with his new hosts, fumbled with his first smartphone, sipped a nonalcoholic pina colada with his lawyers and held a real-time video call with family in Pakistan and the United States from his adopted homeland, Belize.

Khan, 42, is the first prisoner to be freed from Guantánamo Bay who had been held there as a “high-value detainee,” the intelligence community’s phrase for a former prisoner of the Bush administration’s secret torture program of “enhanced interrogation.”

When he emerged last week from two decades of social isolation that began in years of solitary confinement, plans and ambitions and observations spilled from his mouth, at times in random bits of rapid-fire conversation.

“I want to go back to work. Don’t tell me to chill out, man,” Khan said excitedly.

He thought he might want to run a restaurant. He definitely wants to run for public office.

“Tell the prime minister,” he quoted himself as telling Eamon Courtenay, the foreign minister, moments after he and his tabby cat, Cheetah, landed in Belize on a flight from the US military base in Cuba.

By the way, Khan added, he already had the numbers of two Belizean imams on speed dial, but he had yet to visit their mosques in this nation of 400,000 people, about 600 of them Muslims.

Later, he recited a fragment of a freestyle poem he said he left on his cell door at Guantánamo Bay. “On this day, Feb. 2, 2023 … God set me free … My actions hurt others, like the sting of a bee. May they forgive me. I can say this or that, A to Z. To prove my skeptics wrong, I hope to be.”

He said he signed it with what he called a mic drop: “Majid Khan has left the building.”

Hours later, Belize’s foreign minister summoned his nation’s leading news organizations and announced that, as “a humanitarian act,” Khan, his wife and their teenage daughter would be joining Belizean society.

Courtenay then told Khan’s life story, which he later said his nation deserved to know.

Khan was exposed to radical Islam in Maryland, where he had attended high school in the 1990s. He left for Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks and became a courier for Al Qaeda. From 2003 to 2006, he was held incognito by the CIA, which subjected him to “the most horrific torture.”

At Guantánamo, he pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and began cooperating with the US government. “I have full confidence that he will be a good Belizean in the years to come,” Courtenay said. “He never injured or killed anyone, nor was he ever involved in combat.”

To give the Khan family a solid foundation for a fresh start, he said, Belize had required that the United States provide funds to buy him a home, a phone, a laptop and a car.

One of Khan’s first calls on that new phone was to the two New York City lawyers who had represented him longest and helped him navigate his path to freedom: J. Wells Dixon of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, from 2006, and Katya Jestin of Jenner&Block, from 2009.

They and three other members of his legal team had rushed to Belize from the Eastern Seaboard a day before his release and anxiously waited near their hotel’s swimming pool in the sultry heat for confirmation that he had been freed.

After nightfall, Khan strolled into the pool area in shorts and a button-down shirt in the company of three Belizeans who were serving as his guides: a government worker, a security officer and a social worker. There were hugs, handshakes and giddy conversation.

Somebody on the team ordered the coconut-flavoured mocktail for Khan, who observes the strictures of Islam. Another handed him a box of Cohiba cigars, produced in the Cuban-controlled portion of the island. He asked for a few tips about his new iPhone 13, which he polished with a napkin like every first-time user. It was a considerable upgrade from the old-school analog phone with a pull-up antenna he had in Pakistan before his capture.

Then his brother called. Khan settled into a poolside lounge chair, and one after the other, his father, other siblings, nieces and nephews popped up in different windows for a raucous, chatty video family reunion. A lawyer brought him shrimp tacos and soda for his dinner.

The call was impossible a day earlier at Guantánamo, even for someone such as himself who cooperated with the government. The intelligence agencies monitored all his calls with family from the prison, with each caller pausing after a sentence or so — time enough for censors to hear and bleep out anything that implicated national security.

The foreign minister called Khan “intelligent, intellectually curious and an excellent cook” who is “outgoing and will easily make friends in Belize.” From Day One, he was “free to travel throughout the country, study, work, start a business and make the most of his life after almost 20 years in detention.”

So on Day Two, Khan and his lawyers had an outing. They ate lunch at a seafront restaurant, took team photos on a pier and then went shopping, an expedition that had the feel of a family taking a son to college.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times