Ron DeSantis accused of illegal acts of torture against Guantanamo detainees when he was a Navy JAG officer
Former Guantanamo inmate Mansoor Adayfi’s depiction of himself being nasally force fed. “We had no rights at #Guantanamo. We had no power. We had nothing but our bodies and our lives and we had to use them to bring about change. Going on #hungerstrike is like entering a dark tunnel & the light at the end is death,” he wrote on Twitter in September 2021.
By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
Before he was governor, before he was a congressman, Ron DeSantis was a Lt. Commander and JAG lawyer in the U.S. Navy, serving at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist detention camp in Cuba and Fallujah during the Iraq War.
Not much is known about DeSantis’s duties at those locations. DeSantis has released only limited highlights of his military career – noting in a speech, for example, that he spent Christmas 2006 in Guantanamo without his family – and has declined repeatedly to be interviewed about it, most recently to Florida Bulldog. His official biography, cited by Wikipedia and other information sources, touts that he “still serves in the U.S. Navy Reserve,” but the Navy says otherwise.
A Navy data sheet about DeSantis provided to Florida Bulldog last week lists his separation date from the Navy as Feb. 14, 2019 – a month after his first inauguration. “He’s not active or reserve. He’s not a member of the Navy anymore,” said U.S. Navy spokeswoman Lt. Alyson Hands.
https://www.floridabulldog.org/2023/01/ron-desantis-accused-torture-at-guantanamo-when-he-was-navy-jag/
