Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has faced accusations that he watched prisoners being tortured at the prison at the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba while he served at the base as a lawyer in the Navy.
Earlier this year, The Independent reported that a former prisoner – Mansoor Adayfi – alleged that Mr DeSantis observed his brutal force-feeding by guards during a hunger strike in 2006 – a practice the United Nations characterised as torture.
Mr Adayfi is a Yemeni citizen who was held for 14 years at the US Naval base.
Mr DeSantis was stationed at the base between March 2006 and January 2007, according to his military records, and part of his role involved hearing complaints and concerns from prisoners over their conditions.
“I was a junior officer. I didn’t have authority to authorise anything,” Mr DeSantis told Piers Morgan in an interview in March.
“There may have been a commander that would have done feeding if someone was going to die, but that was not something that I would have even had authority to do,” he added.
The Florida governor’s response did not address the central allegation from the detainee that he witnessed the force-feeding. Investigations by The Independent, The Washington Post and other outlets did not report that Mr DeSantis authorised the force-feeding – rather, that he observed and was aware of the practice.
Two prisoners held at the camp at the time Mr DeSantis was stationed there claim he witnessed the forced-feeding of hunger-striking prisoners. Mr Adayfi claims that Mr DeSantis had initially told him he was there for the detainees’ welfare. Part of his role was to field concerns and complaints from prisoners.
The US government has denied that force-feeding hunger strikers amounts to torture, and it has been used against prisoners over successive administrations during hunger strikes.
In 2006, the year Mr DeSantis arrived at Guantanamo, the camp was rocked by hunger strikes, violent riots and protests from prisoners over their conditions.
In February of that year, camp authorities began to implement a more aggressive regime of dealing with hunger strikers, according to a New York Times report from the time.
That method, according to the Times, involved “strapping some of the detainees into ‘restraint chairs’ to force-feed them and isolate them from one another after finding that some were deliberately vomiting or siphoning out the liquid they had been fed”.
Mr Adayfi told The Independent that Mr DeSantis was present for a particularly brutal episode of force-feeding at the base.
“He was watching, and I was really screaming, crying,” Mr Adayfi said in a video call from his home in Belgrade earlier this year. “I was bleeding and throwing up. We were in the block yard, so they were close to the fence.”
Mr DeSantis has spoken sparingly of his time at Guantanamo Bay, where he served between March 2006 and January 2007 with the US Navy, at 27-years-old, as a judge advocate general (JAG), a job which entailed providing legal representation to military personnel and ensuring the US military complied with the law.
Since serving at the military prison, Mr DeSantis has consistently argued for it to remain open, and spoken against the release of prisoners, even though most are held for years without charge.
At a congressional hearing chaired by Mr DeSantis in 2016, the then-congressman forcefully argued for Guantanamo to remain open.
“The president’s conclusion that the detention facility should be closed is based in part on his idea that the facility is a recruiting tool for Islamic jihadists, but this represents a misunderstanding of the nature of the terrorist threats we face,” he said. “These are not the type of people that will abandon their jihad against America and our allies simply because we close Guantanamo Bay,” he told the House of Representatives Subcommittee of National Security, part of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
In the same session, he spoke briefly of his time there.
Adayfi says many of the force-feeding incidents took place outside the Oscar and November blocks of Delta Camp
