During an interview Tuesday, Ron DeSantis offered a strong defense of a murky period in his professional resume.
The Florida Governor defended his actions during the Global War on Terror, specifically honing in on “interventions” to stop hunger strikes from suspected Al Qaeda captives, and describing Guantanamo Bay as a “professionally-run” operation.
Asked about the actions being “torture” by an Iowa interlocutor, the Governor pushed back against the characterization.
“This happens in prisons all the time where people do this and there’s intervention. Yes, there’s been interventions that are done with court approval to keep people alive. So I think that’s just something that a lot of the liberal corporate media has tried to spin up to doing that,” DeSantis said on WOWT.
DeSantis was an officer and Navy lawyer at Gitmo in 2006, when prisoners committed to a mass hunger strike. Guards there ultimately restrained and force-fed many of them using nasal tubes — a practice the United Nations Human Rights Commission deemed a form of torture.
Numerous former detainees have since claimed they interacted with DeSantis during that time, and many news outlets, including The Washington Post, reported DeSantis backed the forced feedings.
The Governor rejects those characterizations and spoke further Tuesday about the essential humanity of the treatment of convicts at the U.S. military base on the island of Cuba.
“I can tell you this just as a young naval officer. When I went down to Guantanamo Bay, I had an image of what was going on down there based on what the media was. We actually got down there. It was a very professionally run operation. They were following all the available rules and as somebody that had served as served in Iraq as well, I can tell you if you had a choice to be in Gitmo or in like the Fallujah local jail, Gitmo was much, much more humane.”
DeSantis has offered varying narratives of his actions during that part of his career.
Asked about his time at Gitmo when on an international tour this year, DeSantis forcefully denied claims from an Israeli reporter that he “attended the force-feeding” of Al Qaeda captives while on site as a legal advisor.
“No, no, all that’s BS. Totally. Totally BS,” DeSantis said. “Who said that?”
The London Independent reported in March that a former prisoner, Mansoor Adayfi, claimed DeSantis “observed his brutal force-feeding by guards during a hunger strike in 2006.”
“Do you honestly believe that’s credible? So this is 2006, I’m a junior officer. Do you honestly think that they would have remembered me from Adam? Of course not. They’re just trying to get into the news, because they know people like you will consume it, because it fits the pre-ordained narrative that you’re trying to spin.”
“So, I was a junior officer. I didn’t have the authority to authorize anything,” he told Piers Morgan in 2023. “There may have been a commander that would have done feeding if someone was going to die, but that wasn’t something that I would even have had authority to do.”
But DeSantis painted a somewhat different picture of his role in deciding to tube-feed detainees while talking to CBS News Miami investigative reporter Jim DeFede in August 2018, when the Governor was still serving in Congress.
Prompted by DeFede to describe the work he did at Guantánamo, DeSantis said he was a “legal adviser” who helped those running the facility navigate tough choices in dealing with detainees for whom “the jihad was still ongoing.”
Unprompted, the Governor brought up force-feeding, which he said was something a legal adviser there would recommend.
“They would wage jihad any way they can,” he said. “They would do hunger strikes, and you actually had three detainees that committed suicide with hunger strikes.
“So, everything at that time was legal in nature one way or another, so the commander wants to know, ‘Well, how do I combat this?’ So, one of the jobs of the legal adviser (was) to be like, ‘Hey, you actually can force-feed. Here’s what you can do. Here’s kind of the rules of that.”
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