Ron DeSantis Had SO MUCH FUN Watching Prisoners Tortured On Guantanamo!

Former prisoners remember him laughing and smiling.

If there is one thing we have learned about Ron DeSantis during his tenure as the governor of Florida, it is that he likes to hurt people. It makes him feel like a real big man to go after LGBTQ people, to go after students who want to actually learn things other than creepy right-wing propaganda in school and at college, to go after Black people who don't want to pretend that racism isn't real or bad, and to go after all the woke nerds who think it's bad to be shitty to all of those people.

No one comes by a mean streak like that out of nowhere. As you may or may not know, while DeSantis was in the Navy, he worked as an attorney at Guantánamo Bay, which was not known to be big on the whole human rights thing. It certainly wasn't the kind of place the Navy, particularly the Navy of 2006, would send anyone who they thought might have a problem with watching people be tortured.

This seems like the kind of thing that should really get more scrutiny, given that there is a strong chance that he will be running for president in the near future.

In an interview that aired on Tuesday with Amy Goodman of "Democracy Now," former Guantanamo prisoner Mansoor Adayfi detailed how he first met the Florida governor, as well as how DeSantis witnessed him being tortured and apparently found it very funny.

Adayfi was 18, a former goat herder and security guard from Yemen who had recently moved to Afghanistan to go to university, when he says he was ambushed in his truck by Afghan warlords who kidnapped him, accused him of being an Egyptian al-Qaeda leader, and sold him to the CIA for a lot of money after 911. He had assumed that at some point someone would figure out that he wasn't an Egyptian al-Qaeda leader because "how could an 18-year-old from Yemen be an Egyptian al-Qaida leader when he couldn’t even speak the language captives accused him of speaking?" — but that never happened.

Adayfi was taken to a black site where he and others were tortured for days and then taken to Guantanamo Bay where he would spend the next 14 years of his life, without being charged with anything, before he was finally released. In 2021, he published a memoir of his experience titled Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantánamo .

Ron DeSantis has been shady about his time at Gitmo, going back and forth about whether or not he had anything to do with force feeding, but Adayfi and other prisoners featured in the video say they saw him there for sure. Adayfi says that there were two kinds of force feeding — one performed by doctors or nurses (which is still quite horrifying, by the way) and another where it was specifically used like torture. The latter was what DeSantis was present for.

Via Truth Out:  

"By the beginning of 2006, a new medical team, a new camp staff arrived. One of them was a young — a young, handsome officer, who came to talk to us and told us he was there to ensure that we were being treated humanely. And we talked to him about why we were on hunger strike, what were our demands. It wasn’t jihad, as he said, like. And, you know, what people always try to turn our actions in Guantánamo as like in jihad or al-Qaeda activist cell, that what used to tell us all the time. So, these were our demands. Stop the torture. We were asking for them to improve the living condition in the camp. And he was talking to us and assured us that everything will change, and he will make sure that we be treated humanely.

"Only two months, only like, I think, even less, only even less two months later, we were dragged to block — solitary confinement, different camp, different blocks. A new medical team arrived, and they start forcing feed us. And I’m [inaudible] no problem with the force-feeding. They used the force-feeding as a mean of torture. You know, I was taken to a nonformal block in Camp 2. I was tied to a force-feeding chair. Like, I couldn’t move at all. I could only breathe. Guards bring piles of Ensure. And they started with the nurses pouring can of Ensure one after another, like the only way like you eat.

"So, during the feeding, a group of officers arrived with the interpreters, with the interrogators, camp staff, medical staff. They were behind the fence. And I saw one of them was Ron DeSantis in a military uniform. And he was — while I was screaming, yelling, because I couldn’t breathe, of the Ensure, and was like — I was bleeding, because they really insert the thick tube through my nose. So, I was, like, calling them, asking, and he was actually laughing, looking at the other officers, and smiling. So, this is my first encounter — second encounter with the Ron DeSantis. The first, before the force-feeding, he came to talk to us and other prisoners. Second time I saw him like twice while on the force-feeding."

That's our Ron!

There's certainly something extra sadistic about the act of coming in there and saying that you are there to help people and treat them humanely and then later cackling while someone is screaming and bleeding with Ensure being forced up their nose. That is well-beyond Dexter territory.

This isn't the first time Adayi has talked about seeing DeSantis at Guantanamo. Earlier this year, in an interview with Harper's , he detailed how he actually threw up in DeSantis's face during one of these sessions, as well as how the force feeding that occurred at that time (which he says was the worst of his time in Guantanamo) was "different" from humane efforts to keep people alive:

They used to restrain us in that feeding chair. They tied our head, our shoulders, our wrists, our thighs, and our legs. They put some kind of laxative in the feeding liquid. We were shitting ourselves all the time. Then we were moved to solitary confinement—really cold cells. It was like five times a day. It wasn’t feeding. It was just torture. Five times a day. You can’t possibly handle it. They just kept pouring the Ensure. In one week, they broke all the hunger strikers. And he was there. All of them were watching. They also used to beat us. And if we screamed or were bleeding out of our nose and mouth, they were like, “Eat.” The only word they told you was “eat.” We were beaten all day long. Whatever you were doing—they just beat you. Pepper spray, beating, sleep deprivation. That continued for three months. And he was there. [DeSantis] was one of the people that supervised the torture, the abuses, the beatings. All the time at Guantánamo.

America!

I am, at best, a halfway decent human being and I can barely read that paragraph without wanting to cry. I could not get through this whole video of Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) voluntarily undergoing the "humane" version of force feeding at Guantanamo Bay.

 www.youtube.com 

What else could someone who watches something like that be capable of? Never mind someone who laughs at it.

As terrible as he's been, it seems like we have not yet seen the worst of Ron DeSantis.

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