As the whole country was preoccupied with the Chinese spy balloon last week, one of the 9/11 terrorist planners was quietly released from Guantanamo Bay in Cuba by the Biden regime.
On Thursday, Majid Khan, now 42, was moved to Belize, his legal team announced.
“Today, more than 16 years after he was brought to Guantánamo Bay and almost a year after he completed a military commission sentence there, pursuant to a plea and cooperation agreement with U.S. authorities, Majid Khan was transferred to Belize,” his legal team said in a statement.
Khan is one of the few detainees to be relocated to the Western Hemisphere and the first to be resettled under the Biden regime.
“He is the first of the prisoners transferred from secret CIA detention to Guantánamo in September 2006 to be released, and the first third-country resettlement by the Biden administration. Mr. Khan and his legal team are deeply grateful to Belize for offering him a chance to begin a new life.”
“I have been given a second chance in life and intend to make the most of it,” said Khan in a statement issued by his legal team.
“I deeply regret the things that I did many years ago, and I have taken responsibility and tried to make up for them. I continue to ask for forgiveness from God and those I have hurt. I am truly sorry. The world has changed a lot in 20 years, and I have changed a lot as well. I promise all of you, especially the people of Belize, that I will be a productive, law-abiding member of society. Thank you for believing in me, and I will not let you down. My actions will speak louder than my words.”
Around a dozen countries were contacted by the Biden administration in an effort to provide Khan a new home, according to NBC.
According to two U.S. sources, Secretary of State Antony Blinken was “personally involved” in negotiating the deal with Belize. A senior State Department official said the matter was discussed during a September meeting with the Belizean prime minister.
Not only that, two high-ranking U.S. officials and a former high-ranking government official told NBC that at least two more detainees will be moved from Gitmo in the coming weeks.
The outlet reported:
A Pakistani citizen and Guantanamo’s only known legal U.S. resident, Khan was granted asylum while attending high school near Baltimore in 1998. He returned to Pakistan in 2002 and, according to a Defense Department detainee assessment, joined Al Qaeda and became a direct subordinate to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, often known as KSM, Al Qaeda’s senior operational planner and the principal architect of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
KSM, according to the U.S. documents, tasked Khan with delivering money and transporting another senior Al Qaeda figure to carry out a deadly attack on the Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, in August 2003. KSM intended to use Khan to attack U.S. gas stations and water reservoirs, the U.S. alleges.
Khan was arrested in Karachi in March 2003 and taken to a CIA black site where, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, he was subjected to sleep deprivation, an ice water bath, and forced rectal feeding and rehydration. In the report, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., called the treatment torture.
In September 2006, then-President George W. Bush announced that Khan was one of 14 “high value detainees” being transferred from CIA detention facilities to Guantanamo Bay to face the military tribunal system. One of the other high-value detainees was KSM, who had also been captured in Pakistan in March 2003 and held at black sites.
In 2012, Khan pled guilty to terrorism-related charges and was sentenced to 10 years detention. That sentence ended March 1, 2022. Khan still has family in the U.S., but federal law does not allow Guantanamo detainees to be resettled in the U.S.