Exclusive: New DeSantis Torture Victim Speaks

Exclusive Eyewitness Interview Corroborates Claims of Human Rights Abuses

The following is the transcript of a new episode of the EYES LEFT Podcast (an Empire Files production). Listen wherever you stream podcasts. Story by Mike Prysner.

In November of last year, the Eyes Left podcast broke the story of Ron DeSantis overseeing torture at Guantanamo Bay during its worst year, based on an exclusive interview with former detainee Mansoor Adayfi. This brought to light for the first time some of his highly problematic actions there, beyond the most obvious of running legal cover for torture: lying to detainees that he was there to be their legal advocate, only to use their trust in him to torture them harder; to not only being present for force feeding, but seeming to take pleasure in it. As a designated “human rights lawyer,” Ron showed his true character; helping cover-up crimes the international community was rightfully condemning, choosing to goose-step alongside Bush and Cheney. 

For months after the story came out, kind of to my surprise, it received zero coverage in the mainstream media. It got picked up on a couple alternative left media outlets, but even there it wasn’t much.

But then there was a turning point. The interview got the attention of Harper’s Magazine; Harper’s is the longest running magazine in America, published since 1850––and among other accomplishments ran Seymour Hersh’s original reporting on My Lai Massacre.

So three months after our story, unbeknownst to me, they published a portion of my interview with Mansoor in their February issue. In early March, their social media pages started promoting the interview. All of the sudden, there was interest in the story from the news media. 

As I had hoped by publishing the original story, other journalists started doing their own digging, and uncovering more details. Some credited Eyes Left with breaking the story––like a great featured print article in The Baffler Magazine by Jasper Craven, as well as a Yahoo News piece by Alexander Nazaryan–-others just did their own interview with Mansoor, asked the same questions, and left out how it came to light. 

Then there was another turning point when the Washington Post published their own story on March 19 (one of the outlets that didn’t credit us)––taking it to the next level of establishment media attention, as one of the papers of record for the ruling class. 

Washington Post reporter Michael Kranish added a really important find; an unearthed CBS interview from 2018, where DeSantis says the force-feeding practice may have come at his recommendation. 

CBS: So, were you interviewing terrorists? Were you a legal advisor?

Ron DeSantis: I was a legal advisor. The things that would happen, the thing that you notice the day you get down there is that for these detainees, the jihad was still ongoing.

CBS: Right.

Ron DeSantis: They would wage jihad any way they can. Now, they’re in a facility so it’s limited, but some of the things they would do, they would do hunger strikes. So everything at that time was legal in nature in one way or another. So the commander wants to know, well how do I combat this? So one of the jobs of the legal advisor is to be like ‘Hey, you actually can force feed. Here’s what you can do. Here’s kind of the rules of that.’

So here Ron admits something pretty major, that was not picked up on at all by the Washington Post nor any other media. 

At first glance, it already is significant: DeSantis implies either he recommended force feeding as a method to combat the hunger strike (which he calls terrorist jihad), or at the very least was part of the legal team that signed-off on it. 

But that is not why this is really significant. It is well documented that force-feeding hunger strikers had been taking place nonstop for years prior to DeSantis’s arrival in 2006. So why would DeSantis say he was part of the decision to use force-feeding against the hunger strikers, when force feeding had already been authorized and used for years?

What nobody has caught, including the Washington Post, is that what began in 2006 was a major change in force-feeding, when it became specifically designed to inflict extreme pain. 

Mansoor Adayfi told me that prior to the arrival of DeSantis in 2006, it was a relatively tolerable procedure. Previously it was conducted at the base hospital, with detainees laying down on a cot, with a normal-sized nasal tube, and done no more than twice per day. While it was meant to be a very unpleasant experience in order to break the hunger strike, the determined protesters were able to endure it day in and day out and continue their strike.

Then in the DeSantis era, what he seems to admit to have helped recommend and authorize, was making it just absolutely brutal: using totally unnecessarily thick nasal tubes, with sharp metal tips at the end that would cause excessive bleeding, with detainees tightly restrained from head to toe in a torture chair, administered violently by guards, coupled with beatings, and done over and over and over again all day to the point of extreme vomiting and diarrhea while still strapped to the chair. This was impossible to endure. 

It was about using the pain and suffering and violence to break the resolve of the peaceful protesters simply because they were making problems on the international stage for the embroiled Bush Admin. THAT is what was recommended and authorized by the legal team DeSantis was part of in 2006––not force feeding itself, but extreme torture under the veil of a “legal medical procedure.” So in 2018 when Ron fessed up to giving the legal stamp of approval, he probably assumed the media would never look beneath the surface––and he has been right, until now. 

The Washington Post also interviewed a corroborating source, former detainee Abu Sarrah Ahmed Abdel Aziz, who was not a hunger striker but says he spoke to DeSantis multiple times, and that his pleas to him for legal and human treatment always resulted in things getting worse. This was an important contribution that helped backup Mansoor's accusations. 

I have actually been speaking with Abdel Aziz since before that story was published, and have some great recorded interviews with him I will be releasing here in the near future. 

Then another revelation in late March: after refusing to comment from the press on whether or not Mansoor’s accusations were true, DeSantis finally talked about it in an interview––and it was terrible. Piers Morgan basically tried to help him kill the story with a totally false framing.

Piers Morgan: One of the things they said was that you authorized the use of force-feeding at some of the…

Ron DeSantis: That’s not true, yeah that’s not true…

PM: Just to finish, force-feeding the detainees that were on hunger strike. Was that true?

Ron DeSantis: So, I was a junior officer. I didn’t have the authority to authorize anything, 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 the authority to do.

Piers Morgan: So that’s wrong?

Ron DeSantis: Yeah, absolutely. 

This was a totally made up accusation. Nobody every reported that DeSantis himself authorized torture––Washington Post reported that DeSantis himself indicated he may have suggested the torture practice of force-feeding in his capacity as a legal advisor. So Piers asked him to respond to an accusation that was never made. But the biggest pieces of the scandal Piers completely left out: that Ron observed torture as the human rights lawyer and never reported the illegal acts making him complicit; that he pretended to be the legal advocate and ally to the detainees in order to abuse their trust for intelligence to use against them; and that the man notorious for being a bully appeared to take great pleasure in watching the horrific abuse of at least one eyewitness, Mansoor Adayfi. Either Piers actually knew nothing about the story he was asking a “hard question” about, or he was intentionally trying to help run cover for Ron’s past. And notice how Ron started to launch into his answer before Piers even finished the question? It’s almost like he knew it was coming! Like the whole thing was set up to bury it. 

Thankfully the softball question didn’t take any momentum out of the story, and Ron finally faced a tough question from the press. Less than a week ago, Ron took questions at Israel’s Museum of Tolerance of all places. Probably expecting a friendly press pool, one reporter hit him on the torture story. This clip has gotten so viral it was even on the May 1st episode of The Stephen Colbert Show.

Stephen Colbert: That wasn’t the only low light from DeSantis’s trip. Here he is responding to a question about a former GITMO detainee, who claims DeSantis was present while he was being tortured.

Reporter: During your time at Guantanamo did you witness any torture?

Ron DeSantis: No, no, all that’s BS. 

Reporter: They’re saying you were present during force feedings. Is that…

Ron DeSantis: Who said that?

Reporter: Detainees.

Ron DeSantis: How would they know me? Okay? Think about that. Do you honestly believe that’s credible? So this is 2006, I’m a junior officer, do you honestly think 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 your preordained narrative.

Stephen Colbert: Do you really think a guy would remember me? No one remembers me. I don’t remember me! What’s my name again?

Yeah that’s a meltdown. Ron is clearly rattled, and is finally being haunted by these skeletons. I think his defense of saying, how could these people possibly remember me as just one guy among hundreds, so long ago, is perfectly answered by the aforementioned detainee and DeSantis witness Abdel Aziz, in a conversation we had a few weeks ago:

Abdel Aziz: The bad people were not much, 20 - 25%. More than 70% of people were doing their job without being malicious towards us, without trying to hurt us, without enjoying to make people suffer. Despite being soldiers [and] under orders. They are not required to do very bad things to us. So there’s bad people and we cannot forget them because they were doing extra jobs, they were volunteering to torture people and make people suffer!

You were one of the bad ones Ron, people remember you because you were part of some terrible traumatic moments in their life––what was described as by far the worst year of torture at GITMO. Bullies and abusers tend to forget their victims, but it doesn’t work the other way around. 

It’s also interesting that he’s not just owning it––Trump, if you remember, was elected advocating MORE torture, suggesting the US start doing even more war crimes against Muslims on the battlefield and in detention. Perhaps Ron is denying his involvement, rather than boasting of being tough on terrorists, because he is a lawyer and he knows that what he did was not within the bounds of the law. He got his hands dirty, and a little bloody too, so he’d rather wash them off even if taking the Trump approach would score him some political capital. Furthermore there are still his actions in Iraq which have yet to be uncovered, which we speculated about in our original story, and he may be bracing for more allegations. I still believe there is another story there if someone can find a source. 

Nevertheless, this is all now a problem for the rising far-right leader and Navy officer. He is currently relying on the fact that he only has one accuser asserting he was a witness, and even a participant, in the torture. He can just say, well this person just wants attention, and is manipulating the media, you can’t judge me off the claims of one guy. 

So the worst thing for Ron right now would be another victim testifying to his complicity in abuse. 

And that’s what I have for you today. I was able to interview another former detainee, who like Mansoor was a hunger striker, and was beaten and bloody in front of “legal observer” LT Ron DeSantis. 

Before we hear this testimony, I have to explain that my source insists on remaining anonymous. Part of that is, as you can imagine based on what these detainees have been through, a justifiable fear of retaliation from the US or a future president DeSantis. Both Adayfi and Abdel Aziz have put themselves at risk by going public with their accusations. 

But for my source in particular, he is living in a country where the government that agreed to take him in upon his release from GITMO, made his residency there contingent on a few rules: one of those rules was that he was to never speak to the media. He even had to sign a document agreeing to these terms, and risks being deported from his country of residence, where he has a life, just for sharing his story. But he is taking that risk in order to help expose one of the perpetrators of the torture he endured. 

So this former prisoner answered my questions on the condition that I would conceal his identity. I did due diligence in verifying who he was, based on info he gave me I pulled his prisoner file from the Wikileaks Guantanamo documents. I also had other sources who know him, including Mansoor Adayfi, corroborate that he is who he says he is.  

The audio of his voice you will hear, before it is translated, is distorted to help mask his identity. The translation is by my friend Omar Abusheikh, who received the original recording.

I was only able to get some brief comments from him, with just a couple follow up questions, but as you will hear, it adds extremely damning new corroborations to the testimony of Mansoor Adayfi. 

Detainee X: I was one of the hunger strikers and was force-fed for 10 years. In 2006 I was tortured by the camp administration and medical staff until I passed out, I was taken to ICU as a result of the torture. Lieutenant DeSantis was one of the officers who oversaw the force-feeding and the torture we endured in 2006. He and other officers, translators, and interrogators would come to see us during the force-feeding.

He was with officers who mistreated us, tortured the prisoners who were on hunger strike, raided Camp 4 and closed it, assaulting the prisoners, beating them and shooting at them with rubber bullets.

Yes, this Lieutenant DeSantis was one of the officers who mistreated us, broke the hunger strike, and shut down Camp 4.

Mike: When did you first realize that Governor DeSantis was the same young Lieutenant you saw back in 2006?

Detainee X: I recognized Desantis when Mansoor shared his photo in a WhatsApp group two years ago. 

Mike: What is your response to DeSantis claiming you and Mansoor could not possibly remember him from so long ago?

Detainee X: DeSantis is someone who fakes facts.

Mike: When you first met DeSantis, did he initially say he was there to be your legal advocate?

Detainee X: Yes, when he first met us he told us that he came to help us be treated humanely.

Mike: What was the worst incident you endured that DeSantis was present for?

Detainee X: The worst of what I experienced while [DeSantis] was there was the torture by force feeding and beating at the hands of the guards. He was looking at me like I was an animal. There was a lot of blood on my clothes and on the floor.

This exclusive testimony corroborates all of Mansoor Adayfi’s key claims, especially DeSantis’s role as someone brought in to brutally break the peaceful and legitimate protest by the hunger strikes, under the guise of being the human rights defender. The claims here would mean DeSantis was complicit in human rights violations, and failed to act on his legal responsibility to stop or report those crimes. And, as both eyewitness accounts reveal, DeSantis’s personal mannerisms while witnessing these heinous acts demonstrate a level of sadism and inhumanity that should preclude anyone from political or military power--both of which Ron possesses a lot of, with aspirations for more. As Jasper Craven wrote in Baffler: “Ron DeSantis’s blind faith to the military in its worst moments doesn’t bode well should he ever claim the title of commander in chief.”