While the nation and the world were looking up in the sky, agog at the prospect of our national and global humiliation in the form of the Chinese spy balloon, Old Joe Biden and his handlers were keeping busy with more important matters. On Thursday, they freed one of the highest-level jihad terrorists at Guantánamo. What could possibly go wrong? And is there anything, anything at all on God’s green earth, that Biden’s handlers won’t do if it makes Americans poorer and less safe?
The Washington Post reported Thursday that this particular jihadi was being freed because the poor man had suffered so much at the hands of the United States. Majid Khan, “a former al-Qaeda courier who endured dehumanizing treatment at CIA black sites before spending more than 15 years in Guantánamo Bay,” was released and resettled in Belize. The Post called this “a milestone in President Biden’s push to close the high-profile prison but one that underscores he [sic] difficulties he will face in doing so.”
To be sure, Khan has sounded all the right notes of repentance. “I deeply regret the things that I did many years ago, and I have taken responsibility and tried to make up for them,” he said. “The world has changed a lot in twenty years, and I have changed a lot as well.” You can say that again, Majid. The Post’s photo of the former prisoner, taken in 2018, shows a fit Khan in a matinee-idol pose, sporting a full head of black hair and a neatly trimmed black beard. NPR, by contrast, used a 2022 photo of the former jihadi. It clearly was a tumultuous four years since the first photo, but whatever agonies Majid Khan suffered at Gitmo, hunger was not among them: the new photo shows his tousled hair gone and his beard, now trimmed back to a goatee, gone gray. But the most striking difference between the photos is that Khan, while an inmate at Gitmo, appears to have gained around thirty or forty pounds. Oh, the torture!
The chubby-cheeked former warrior for Allah promises not to cause any more trouble for anyone: “I have been given a second chance in life and I intend to make the most of it … I promise all of you, especially the people of Belize, that I will be a productive, law-abiding member of society.”
What could possibly go wrong? The lovable lug is a changed man, right? Well, I hate once again to be the one to throw the rotting cabbage onto the sofa, but it’s worth noting that a 2013 study found that 29% of released Gitmo detainees had returned to jihad. Among the Taliban leaders who triumphantly entered Kabul in August 2021 was at least one former Gitmo inmate. Will Majid Khan return to jihad? Why not? It’s what he knows. Of course, he may choose a different path, but there is no indication that Biden’s handlers are releasing him with any concern for the possibility that he might leave Belize and return to the jihadi front lines. The safety and well-being of Americans have never been a priority for the Biden regime; why should they start prioritizing these things now?
Related: Freeing of Guantanamo Detainee Highlights the Confusion and Failure of the ‘War on Terror’
Nevertheless, the freeing of Khan is not entirely unjustified. NPR notes that Khan “pleaded guilty to war crimes in 2012 — becoming one of just two men convicted in the history of Guantánamo’s military court — and completed his sentence in March 2022. Yet he remained there for nearly another year, prompting his lawsuit.” One of his attorneys, Katya Jestin, said: “In what system do you finish your sentence, when you were sentenced by a court of law, and remain in jail? Where does that happen? Certainly not in a democracy that is governed by a system of laws.”
Quite right. And so Khan had to be freed at some point. But when? And why was Belize chosen? If Majid Khan does decide that he wants to wage jihad again inside the United States, all he has to do is join the next passing migrant caravan, make his way to the Southern border, and casually walk across. Biden has rendered Americans so comprehensively vulnerable that the freeing of Khan could backfire in any number of ways. Whether he is in the White House or his taxpayer-funded walled beach house in Delaware, however, Old Joe won’t have to pay the price. That is left to the Great Unwashed, his unhappy and unwilling subjects.
