‘High-value’ Gitmo detainee released by US, sent to Belize
BELIZE CITY, Belize — A small Central American nation, known for its barrier reef and ecotourism, has taken in a former terrorist turned U.S. government informant whose tale of torture by the CIA moved a military jury at Guantanamo Bay to urge the Pentagon to grant him leniency.
U.S. forces released Majid Shoukat Khan into the custody of authorities in Belize on Thursday after a two-hour flight from the U.S. Navy base in Cuba.
It was the first resettlement of a detainee since President Barack Obama’s administration and culminated months of secret diplomacy. All other prisoners released in the intervening years were repatriated. But Khan, who completed his prison sentence nearly a year ago, had nowhere to go.
“I have been given a second chance in life, and I intend to make the most of it,” Khan, 42, said in a statement in which he pledged to become “a productive, law-abiding member of society.”
“I continue to ask for forgiveness from God and those I have hurt,” he said.
The circumstances of his resettlement were not immediately known. But he was expected to be joined by his wife and teenage daughter, who was born after his capture in Pakistan in 2003.
Khan was among the better-known prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, in part because he went to high school in Maryland, then left his immigrant family for his native Pakistan to join al-Qaida after the Sept. 11 attacks.
From 2003 to 2006, he was held incommunicado in secret CIA prisons overseas and kept in dungeonlike conditions that included beatings, nudity, brutal forced feedings, waterboarding
and other physical and sexual abuse.
In 2012, he agreed to testify against other prisoners. He also pleaded guilty to plotting a never-realized suicide bombing years earlier of Pakistan’s president at the time, Pervez Musharraf, and to delivering $50,000 that was used to finance a deadly attack in Indonesia.
His release in Belize was noteworthy for several reasons.
He was the first prisoner to be freed from Guantanamo Bay who had been held there as a “high-value detainee,” the intelligence community’s term for a former prisoner of a CIA black site who was subjected to the Bush administration’s secret torture program of “enhanced interrogation.”
A damning 2014 Senate investigation of the covert program disclosed what the CIA did to Khan when he went on a hunger strike in his second year of detention: His captors “infused” a puree of pasta, sauce, nuts, raisins and hummus into his rectum. His lawyers called it rape.
At his sentencing in 2021, Khan expressed remorse for his crimes and related his story to a U.S. military jury at Guantanamo, which followed war court guidelines and sentenced him retroactively to 26 years in prison.
Seven of the jurors then urged granting him clemency.
“This abuse was of no practical value in terms of intelligence, or any other tangible benefit to U.S. interests,” they said in a handwritten letter from the jury room. “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.”
A U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities, said Belize’s government received Khan as a humanitarian act, to help him seek a fresh start.
With this week’s transfer, the Pentagon now holds 34 prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Of them, 11 have been charged in the military commissions, including six who are awaiting capital trials. Three others, all former CIA prisoners, are being held as indefinite detainees in the war on terrorism — not accused of any crimes but considered too dangerous to release.
The other 20 men, half of them Yemenis, have been approved for transfer to other countries with security agreements that satisfy the secretary of defense, arrangements that have required far more complex diplomacy and at times unknown enticements by the United States.
The Biden administration has repatriated five cleared prisoners, and the Trump administration sent one man to serve a sentence in his native Saudi Arabia. But the last resettlement occurred in the final days of the Obama administration, when Oman accepted eight Yemenis and two Afghan prisoners who could not safely be returned to their home countries.