Observing his glee in humiliating Floridians who don’t agree with him — from high school students to immigrants to Disney to well, everyone — this does not surprise me:
The torture regimes is well documented. We know what they did. And apparently, DeSantis was part of it, assigned to “ensure that the prisoners rights were upheld” but in fact, he oversaw torture, specifically the force feeding tactics to stop the prisoners from staging hunger strikes, (which the Pentagon fatuously defined as a form of “asymmetric warfare.”) DeSantis has been accused of overseeing the force feeding of massive amounts of Ensure causing the inmates to vomit and choke. (Don’t read this link about his time at Gitmo if you have a weak stomach.) I don’t know if it’s all true but the mere fact that DeSantis was part of this grotesque program disqualifies him from ever holding office as far as I’m concerned.
Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote in November of 2021:
With all of the hoopla this past week over the off-year elections, President Biden’s foreign trip, and the ongoing drama on Capitol Hill, there was very little discussion of the latest chapter in one of the most important and horrific stories of our time.
The New York Times reported on an unprecedented sentencing hearing of a detainee held at Guantanamo Bay. It was the first time a prisoner detailed in public the torture he underwent at the hands of the U.S. government. There are no adequate words to describe the grotesque war crimes committed against this man. Times’ reporter Carol Rosenberg, who has covered the Guantanamo legal proceedings for many years now, vividly detailed the story of 41-year-old Majid Khan, a Pakistani citizen who graduated from a Baltimore high school and, as a lost young man, took a trip back to his home country in 2002 after his mother died. There he was seduced into joining a terrorist organization. As he put it, “I went willingly to Al Qaeda. I was stupid, so incredibly stupid. But they promised to relieve my pain and purify my sins. They promised to redeem me, and I believed them.”
Khan was captured by American forces in 2003 and has been held in legal limbo ever since, despite the fact that he cooperated from the beginning. But according to his testimony, the more he cooperated, the more he was tortured. As with so many other victims of the brutal U.S. torture regime, Khan was compelled to make up tales in order to get the torture to stop. When his tales didn’t pan out, he was tortured some more.
The maze of national security restrictions put on Guantanamo prisoners attempting to defend themselves (an almost 20-year long process) has generally made it impossible for them to speak out about what happened to them. But apparently, (it isn’t clear from the reporting) Khan’s lawyers found a way for him to publicly detail the torture he endured without specifically accusing any individuals. So last week, in open court, he took the stand and expressed remorse for his actions and forgave his tormentors. In front of his horrified father and sister, both of whom are American citizens, he laid out for the record what happened to him.
Kahn described in detail the primitive conditions in which he was held: naked, with his hands chained above his head or shackled to the wall crouching “like a dog,” beaten and sleep-deprived to the point of hallucination. He was waterboarded repeatedly and nearly drowned. And then there was the sexual and “medical” sadism, as Rosenberg reports:
[A]fter he refused to eat, his captors “infused” a purée of his lunch through his anus. The C.I.A. called it rectal refeeding. Mr. Khan called it rape.
The C.I.A. pumped water up the rectum of prisoners who would not follow a command to drink. Mr. Khan said this was done to him with “green garden hoses.”
“They connected one end to the faucet, put the other in my rectum and they turned on the water,” he said, adding that he lost control of his bowels after those episodes and, to this day, has hemorrhoids.
He spoke about failed and sadistic responses to his hunger strikes and other acts of rebellion. Medics would roughly insert a feeding tube up his nose and down his throat. He would try to bite it off and, in at least one instance, he said, a C.I.A. officer used a plunger to force food inside his stomach, a technique that caused stomach cramps and diarrhea.
When CIA officers transferred Khan from one black site to another, they would insert an enema and then duct tape a diaper on him so he wouldn’t have to be taken to the bathroom.
Kahn was eventually charged with four terrorism charges and pled guilty to delivering $50,000 from Pakistan to an Al Qaeda affiliate in early 2003 that was traced to the bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia. At the time of the bombing, Kahn was already in custody. He also worked with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, in some failed plots during his brief period with al Qaeda.
At his trial, the lead prosecutor conceded that Kahn got “extremely rough” treatment but told the jury he was lucky to be alive when the victims of al Qaeda are not. Kahn’s lawyer said “Majid was raped at the hands of the U.S. government. He told them everything from the beginning.”
DeSantis wasn’t part of the black sites program. But the stuff they did at Guantanamo was part and parcel of the policy and all of those who participated are implicated in war crimes.
By the way, none of this surprises me. DeSantis is a monster.