A former detainee at the US military’s prison camp at Guantánamo Bay said Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was complicit in torture when the Republican politician served there as an Army lawyer.
According to the ex prisoner, DeSantis was brought in to break a hunger strike, and he laughed when detainees were violently force-fed by US torturers.
He described these horrors in an interview with journalist Mike Prysner, on his podcast Eyes Left.
Prysner spoke with Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni man who was held at Gitmo, without charge, from 2002 to 2016.
DeSantis is a presidential hopeful who is widely considered a top candidate for the Republican Party in the 2024 election. Today he serves as governor of Florida, the third-most populous US state, and he was previously a member of the House of Representatives.
After graduating from elite Yale University, DeSantis briefly taught at an expensive private school, where students recalled he was sympathetic to the white-supremacist Confederacy in the Civil War.
DeSantis went on to study at Harvard Law School. As an avid supporter of the US “war on terror,” he also joined the Navy.
He served as a lawyer in the military’s judicial arm the Judge Advocate General’s Corps (JAG), going on to advise top officers as they committed atrocities in the illegal US occupation of Iraq.
But before he went to Iraq, DeSantis was sent to work at Guantánamo Bay in 2006, where he helped oversee the US torture camp there located on occupied Cuban territory.
While DeSantis has mentioned his time at Gitmo to gain political capital, he has always been very vague about what he did there, and public records related to his service are largely redacted.
There is not much mainstream corporate media coverage of DeSantis’ time in Guantánamo, and the little reporting that exists whitewashes it, claiming he was there to make sure the US military was following the law.
Adayfi told Prysner in the podcast interview that DeSantis was stationed in Gitmo specifically to break a hunger strike that started in 2005. Hundreds of prisoners refused to eat to protest the inhumane conditions in the torture camp, in which several detainees died.
“They brought in a collection of new ruthless individuals to break the strike,” Adayfi recalled. He said that DeSantis told the detainees he was there to help them, “but it was a trap.”
DeSantis monitored the hunger strikers, gathered intelligence, and advised military officials at the torture camp.
When US prison guards began to force-feed the detainees, Adayfi reported that DeSantis simply watched the torture and laughed.
“We were crying and screaming,” he said. “We were tied to the feeding chair. And that guy was watching. He was laughing.”
Ron DeSantis: A neoconservative lobbying for war on China, Iran, Palestine, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua
While DeSantis has tried to market himself in domestic US politics as a right-wing “populist,” he completely follows bipartisan neoconservative orthodoxy on foreign policy.
DeSantis is a hawk who praised the US “war on terror” and participated in the illegal military occupation of Iraq. He has since pushed for new wars on both China and Iran.
DeSantis strongly supports the illegal US blockades and sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela, and he praised US-led coup attempts in Venezuela and Nicaragua.
Boasting that “Florida is the most Israel-friendly state in the country,” DeSantis even moved to criminalize protest against the apartheid regime.
DeSantis has tried to crush the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which advocates for basic Palestinian human rights.
