Source of the image.
by Mansoor Adayfi
Writer, artist, activist and former prisoner of Guantánamo
So many employees and military guards passed through Guantánamo during my 14-year detention that I remember only the kindest and cruelest—those who seemed to revel in our misery.
In 2021, when my memoir, Don’t Forget Us Here, Lost and Found in Guantánamo, was about to be published, I was on Twitter and saw a picture of a handsome man in a white uniform marina It was Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. I can’t remember what the post was about, probably something about him clashing with President Joe Biden over COVID policies. But I remembered his face. It was a face I could never forget. I saw this face for the first time at Guantánamo in 2006, one of the camp’s darkest years when authorities began violently breaking hunger strikes and three of my brothers were found dead in their cages.
After finding a Miami Herald article in which DeSantis bragged about his service at Guantánamo and confirming that my memory is correct, I sent his photo to a group chat of former detainees. Several replied that they too remembered his face from Guantánamo. Some said seeing his face again brought back painful memories of the trauma they suffered during his incarceration. I have understood it. Even after I had spent the previous years working on my memoirs, which meant reliving everything that had happened at Guantánamo, seeing his face again also caused me a lot of pain.
When I first saw DeSantis, he was on hunger strike.
In 2005, almost all prisoners in the camp began to participate in a hunger strike to protest torture, inhumane treatment and being held indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. In 2006, news about our hunger strike was finally getting out. We feel hopeful.
One day, as we continued our strike in the hope that change was just around the corner, a Naval Judge Advocate General (JAG), who I later learned was DeSantis, walked the isles with other newcomers . He stopped and spoke to us, explaining that his job was to make sure the camp complied with the Geneva Conventions and that we were treated humanely.
I remember him asking why we were still on hunger strike. We told him to look around. Camp Delta was built from metal containers divided into wire mesh cages. In the summer, the cages were like ovens. In winter they were cold and wet. They were loud with huge fans and the echoes of all male voices. Then there was the persistent harassment by guards, the desecration of the Koran, non-existent medical care, systematic torture and total exclusion from the outside world.
We told DeSantis we were on hunger strike because we wanted to know why we were incarcerated. Because we wanted a fair trial to prove our innocence. He took notes. He promised to register our complaints.
A few days later, the guards retrieved me from the cage I was in and took me to the playground of the November Block. There, we were greeted by a group of nurses and bodies standing next to a metal restraint chair and several boxes of “Ensure” liquid nutrients. A group of JAG officers and other observers, including Zak, the camp’s cultural adviser, were watching the scene through the chain-link fence of the courtyard.
I was informed that the US government was determined to break the hunger strike. The doctor in charge, a colonel, told me he didn’t care if I said I was innocent or protested the abuse. He was there for one thing: to feed me. I refused and immediately and violently tied myself to the chair so tightly that I could not move. A nurse forced a thick tube up my nose and down my throat. My nose was bleeding and the pain was so great I thought my head was going to explode. The nurse didn’t stop. Instead, he began pouring Ensure into a feed bag attached to the tube.
“Eat!” cried the nurse. “Eat!”
They poured can after can into the feed bag until my stomach and throat were so full that Ensure came back out of my mouth and nose. I thought I was going to suffocate.
“If you throw up,” said one body, “we’ll start over with a new case and fill you up again.”
As I tried to free myself, I noticed DeSantis’ pretty face in the crowd on the other side of the chain link. He watched me struggle. He was smiling and laughing with other officers while I was screaming in pain.
I threw up in his direction. They jumped back, disgusted. I didn’t care. I was the only one there who had the right to feel disgusted.
That force feeding was inhumane. He was meant to break me and teach me a lesson. He wanted to show me that he was just an animal without human rights. There is no other way to put it, it was torture.
Since I had vomited, they fed me another case. This time, they mixed laxatives in the bag. The mix of Ensure and laxatives completely wrecked my intestines after not having solid food for over nine months. They left me restrained in that chair all night, soiled with my own waste and vomit.
The next day they started again. The message was clear: they would not stop feeding me like this, torturing me, until my hunger strike was over.
So, I ended my hunger strike. All but one of us did. A brother who saw me being carried into my cage said that I was as swollen as a corpse found in the water.
Even so, we continued to protest, especially against the guards who desecrated the Koran. We started planning another hunger strike. In June, three men from my block, Yassir, Mana’a and Ali, were found hanging in their cages, their hands and feet tied, with pieces of clothing around their throats. The camp’s administration called the deaths “suicides” and “asymmetric warfare.” Nobody believed it.
Eventually I was sent to solitary confinement, allowed only to wear shorts or a suicide robe—a heavy, foul-smelling tube of fabric too thick to roll into a noose. Along with others in the solitary block, I was regularly pepper-sprayed, beaten during cell searches, and subjected to cavity searches worse than rape.
I wrote all this in my memoirs. I didn’t say DeSantis was there, witnessing the torture, because I didn’t know who he was when I wrote.
As far as I know, DeSantis did not order my hunger strike to be violently broken or write the policies that allowed it to happen. He was just a guy who claimed he was there to help us and then just watched as we were tortured. He didn’t torture me, but he sure seemed to enjoy it.
Today, the violence my brothers and I endured in 2006, and its connection to DeSantis, is back in the news, not because Florida’s governor has belatedly decided to do the right thing and speak out, but because he might file – to the presidency in 2024. .
In fact, DeSantis still calls Guantánamo a “terrorist detention center,” even though in 2006, the year he was there, an analysis of official documents found that the vast majority of Guantánamo prisoners were innocent men, imprisoned only by a mistaken identity. or because they had been sold to the US for reward money. Regardless of these facts, DeSantis advocated keeping Guantánamo open in his 2016 testimony before the Subcommittee on Homeland Security, in which he asserted that all detainees were “hardened and unrepentant terrorists.”[s]”, whose release “risks harming the national security of the United States”.
At the time of DeSantis’ speech, 80 prisoners remained at Guantánamo. I was one of them. Of the 779 men detained at Guantánamo since it opened in 2002, only 12 have been charged with crimes. Only two have been convicted. I wonder who DeSantis was talking about. He was there. He saw who we were.
I was born in Yemen. In my culture, a man is as good as his word. DeSantis is clearly bending the truth to fit his preferred narrative. He may not be a man worthy of leading Florida, let alone the United States.
My advice to Americans: beware. Do you want as president someone who tries to consolidate his power by creating an atmosphere of fear? Someone who profits from the misery and pain of others? Someone who doesn’t hesitate to bend the truth to further their political goals?
Americans count on DeSantis and what belies his beautiful smile.
original source
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Posted on April 14, 2023
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