Once A C.I.A. Prisoner, Now Free
BELIZE CITY — On his first day of freedom, the 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 piña colada with his lawyers, and held a video call with family in Pakistan and the United States from his adopted homeland, Belize.
Mr. 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 prisoner of the Bush administration’s secret torture program of “enhanced interrogation.”
When he emerged early this month 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,” Mr. 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 U.S. military base in Cuba.
Mr. Khan added that 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, February 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.”
Hours later, Belize’s foreign minister summoned his nation’s leading news organizations and announced that, as “a humanitarian act,” Mr. Khan, his wife and their teenage daughter would be joining Belizean society.
Mr. Courtenay then told Mr. Khan’s life story, which he later said his nation deserved to know. Mr. Khan was exposed to radical Islam in Maryland, where he had attended high school in the 1990s. He left for Pakistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks and became a courier for Al Qaeda. From 2003 to 2006, he was held incognito by the C.I.A., which subjected him to “the most horrific torture.” At Guantánamo, he pleaded guilty to terrorism charges and began cooperating with the U.S. government.
“I have full confidence that he will be a good Belizean in the years to come,” Mr. 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 Mr. Khan’s first calls 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 Center for Constitutional Rights, from 2006, and Katya Jestin of Jenner & Block, from 2009.
Members of his legal team had rushed to Belize from the U.S. a day before his release and waited near their hotel’s swimming pool for confirmation that he had been freed.
After nightfall, Mr. 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.
The foreign minister called Mr. Khan “intelligent, intellectually curious and an excellent cook” who is “outgoing and will easily make friends in Belize.” From Day 1, 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 2, Mr. Khan and his lawyers ate lunch at a seafront restaurant, took photos on a pier and went shopping.
The next stop after the shopping trip was his new home. In an hour, the legal team helped him unpack and straighten out the place.
Still to be purchased was furniture, perhaps a sofa and a dining table, before his wife and the daughter he had yet to meet in person arrived from Pakistan.
Mr. Khan declared Belize “the perfect place, honest to God,” for a man like him seeking to become “a productive member of society.”