FL Paper Demands DeSantis Answer Questions About His Time At Gitmo: Did He Witness Infamous Tortures?

March 13, 2023 Military, Republicans

From the editorial board of the Miami Herald:

The more we hear about Gov. Ron DeSantis’ time as a Navy lawyer in Guantánamo in the spring of 2006, the more questions we have — and the more we think voters need to know. Here is a man who spends an extraordinary amount of time fighting the so-called war against woke, but how about the war on terrorism, the one for which he had a front-row seat? He has barely addressed it.

If he’s going to run for president, well, then, yeah, we need to know exactly what he did as 27-year-old lieutenant at the notorious U.S. military detention facility in Cuba. DeSantis served at Joint Task Force Guantánamo at a turbulent time, no doubt about it.

There was a widespread hunger strike, three men found dead in their cells in one hour on the same day, rising criticism from around the world about this no-man’s-land camp and new transfers of high-value detainees from the CIA. Hunger-striking detainees were being force-fed by strapping them into chairs, something the U.N. Human Rights Commission described as torture.

McClatchy reports:

Interviews with over a dozen former Navy officers and personnel, defense attorneys and former detainees shed light on the access DeSantis would have had to the men held captive on the base, suspended in a legal and ethical gray zone during a turbulent phase in the camp’s history. Guards would strap detainees into the chairs while medical personnel would conduct the feedings, using tubes they would pass through the nose.

Ahmed Abdel Aziz, a former detainee who was released after 13 years without being charged with a crime, told McClatchy in a phone call from Mauritania that he recognized DeSantis after being shown a photo of the Florida governor. “I remember his face very well,” Abdel Aziz said. “He was coming regularly on the blocks, and sometimes he talked, sometimes he didn’t.”

The Florida Bulldog reports:



A second ex-Guantanamo detainee has stepped forward to say that Gov. Ron DeSantis, while a U.S. Navy JAG officer in 2006, watched and allowed the brutal forced feedings of detainees that U.N. human rights authorities, an international physician’s group and others have condemned as a form of torture.

In January, Florida Bulldog reported ex-prisoner Mansoor Adayfi’s account of being force-fed via a painful nasal tube inserted down his throat by Gitmo authorities intent on breaking a hunger strike by dozens of detainees protesting their treatment.

According to Adayfi, DeSantis, a Navy lawyer who told Guantanamo detainees he was there to make sure they were treated humanely, watched in amusement on more than one occasion as he was strapped to a “feeding chair” and cans of Ensure were poured into him as he screamed.

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