NOT. READY. FOR. PRIME. TIME.
Desantis melts down today outside the protective bubble of his carefully controlled, scripted FL events.
At the Museum of Tolerance, of all places.
The question that set DeSnowflake off was about this.
Originally tweeted by Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) on April 27, 2023.
I wrote about this before but I think it’s important. There is evidence that Ron DeSantis covered up torture at Guantanamo. He refuses to talk about it. And if you think the guy in that video up top is incapable of being complicit in torturing you aren’t paying attention.
Here’s an excerpt from the Guardian today. If you are interested in this story, you should read the whole thing:
“DeSantis and his group, the JAGs people were there. They were conducting the investigation,” Aziz said. “They were coming the same day the people died. They came to the cells.”
What DeSantis saw and heard in the hours and days after the three deaths could be key to an enduring mystery that has hung over Guantánamo ever since: how did Ahmed, Utaybi and Zahrani die?
Before the investigation even began, Harris, who would also later serve as US ambassador to Seoul, declared the three prisoners had killed themselves, describing it as “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us”. An official inquiry by the Navy Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS), who DeSantis had been detailed to support, concurred with Harris’s verdict within 11 days, though its findings were only made public two years later, in a report that was rife with contradictions and literal holes, with multiple pages missing.
Anyone who was on the scene would have known there were serious questions about the official account. According to that narrative, the dead men bound their hands and feet, stuck cloth deep down their own throats, fashioned nooses from strips of material, climbed on their washbasins with the noose around their neck and stepped off.
They had only been in the same prison block, Alpha, for 72 hours, in separate cells with empty cells in between. Alpha block was for high-security prisoners who were forbidden to mingle or even talk to each other. Yet the three men were alleged to have conspired to kill themselves in exactly the same manner at exactly the same time.
By the time they were brought to the clinic, Ahmed and Utaybi’s bodies already had advanced rigor mortis, setting the time of death to before 10.30pm. That meant that, according to the official version, they would have been hanging for more than two hours in cells with transparent wire mesh sides, in a block holding about 15 prisoners that was meant to be continually patrolled along a central walkway by a team of six guards.
Mark Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall law school, who led to forensic analyses of the three deaths, said it was hard to imagine that anyone with DeSantis’s legal training would fail to spot the inconsistencies in the official version.
“Any JAG would want to know how guys would die while they’re in a cell guarded by five guys, and how they could have been hanging long enough for rigor mortis and with a rag shoved down their throats,” Denbeaux said.
The NCIS report said that the three men had blocked the view into their cells with blankets and mattresses and stuffed other fabric into their beds to make it look as if they were asleep. It was never explained where they would have all acquired so much material, which was severely restricted. A routine search of all the Alpha block cells by a guard shift a few hours earlier found no evidence of any such banned material. The official report said “apparent suicide notes” were found, but the documents were never submitted for fingerprint or handwriting analysis.
The NCIS investigators did not formally interview the senior medical officer on duty that night, nor did they talk to the soldiers from a military intelligence unit in the guard towers with a clear sight of the camp, and whose version of events was quite different from the NCIS account.
According to Joseph Hickman, who was sergeant of the guard that night, no one was taken from Alpha block to the medical clinic. However, hours earlier in the evening, a white prison van came three times, and each time navy guards took away a prisoner and drove towards a secret site that appeared on no maps, hidden from view and surrounded by razor wire. Hickman and his fellow soldiers referred to it as Camp No as in “No such camp”. It was revealed much later to be a CIA black site, where inmates were subjected to “enhanced interrogation”.
Hickman and his unit were under standing orders not to interfere with the van or to record its movements. The vehicle returned at 11.30pm but Hickman did not see who was in it, because it backed up to the medical clinic where it was unloaded. The soldiers saw no other activity until about 12.15am, when the camp lights were suddenly turned on and the alarm was sounded.
In 2009, two years after he left the army, Hickman approached Denbeaux and together they approached the justice department, then under Barack Obama’s administration, and presented testimony of what he and eight other soldiers saw that night. Officials assured them the deaths would be investigated, but nearly a year of silence went by before Denbeaux got a call saying, without explanation, the investigation had been dropped.
