She was also involved in a CIA order to destroy ninety-two videotapes revealing the torture of men in U.S. Some of Khan’s treatment is detailed in a Senate intelligence committee report, released in 2014, that accused the CIA of inflicting pain and suffering on al-Qaida prisoners far beyond its legal boundaries and deceiving the nation with narratives of useful interrogations unsubstantiated by its own records. Former CIA officials released a book about the Senate torture report criticizing its findings that torture was ineffective. Ahmed Abdel Aziz, a former prisoner who was released after 13 years without being charged with a crime and is currently back at home in Mauritania, also claims that Mr DeSantis witnessed the force-feeding at Guantanamo. Abdel Aziz said that he sought out DeSantis – whose name he didn’t know at the time, as military personnel in Guantánamo did not wear names on their uniforms as a security measure – because he knew that JAG officers offered him an opportunity to air mistreatment claims. Seventeen years later, as the governor of Florida and a potential 2024 presidential contender, DeSantis has largely skimmed over his experience at the base, cryptomaniaks.com fraud giving it a brief mention in his new book, “The Courage to Be Free,” and rarely speaking in depth about his actions in Guantánamo – where prisoners have alleged they suffered abuse and human rights violations.
He made DeSantis part of his team that responded to the issue. “Hey, you actually can force-feed,” DeSantis said he responded in his role as a legal adviser. Abdel Aziz said that DeSantis repeatedly promised to make sure his senior officers heard those complaints. A senior guard later said he ordered that shots be fired at the inmates. “If DeSantis is honest with himself, having served as a naval officer and as a lawyer at Guantánamo, then he surely knows that Guantánamo is a human rights disaster and its continuing existence demeans the United States and is an affront to human rights and the rule of law,” said Dixon, who represents one remaining detainee and is a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. September 2006, with the transfer of Mr. Khan and 13 other so-called high-value detainees to Guantánamo. Michael Bumgarner, the prison commander, said in an interview that he was called to the medical clinic, where he learned that three detainees had been found unresponsive in their cells.
Joseph Hickman, an Army officer who led a group of guards beyond the cell block perimeter, later contested the official version of the events in his memoir, “Murder at Camp Delta: A Staff Sergeant’s Pursuit of the Truth About Guantánamo Bay.” He alleged that the three were killed after an interrogation went too far. One day at Yale University, according to a classmate, DeSantis joined with some friends reciting the closing scene of “A Few Good Men,” in which Tom Cruise plays a Navy military lawyer who defends Marines accused of murder at the Guantánamo base. DeSantis has attributed his decision to join the military to growing up in blue-collar surroundings in Dunedin, Fla. DeSantis’s service at Guantánamo Bay ended on Jan. 31, 2007, according to military records. “I volunteered to serve in Gitmo,” he told the Florida CBS station, using the shorthand for Guantánamo. “I would have challenged it,” Xenakis said in an interview, referring to DeSantis’s advice about force-feeding. Stating his job had been to offer legal advice he told the station: “Everything at that time was legal in nature, one way or another. 11 attacks. “This is not some big bombshell,” he told the judge. Retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Xenakis, the former head of the Southeast Army Medical Command, who at the time was affiliated with Physicians for Human Rights, said he advised detainee lawyers about challenging the practice.
J. Wells Dixon, a detainee lawyer who said he remembers meeting with DeSantis at the base, said that the experience should have convinced the governor the base should be closed. In a Fox News interview on Oct. 11, 2014, host Greta Van Susteren pressed DeSantis on why the detainees needed to be kept there at what she said was an annual cost of $2.7 million each compared with $78,000 at a highest maximum-security federal prison in Colorado known as the supermax. The experts said they were particularly concerned for the plight of an ageing and ill prison population, many of whom have suffered from the ravages of torture experienced in prior decades. As a House member, DeSantis became one of the leading proponents of keeping the prison open, insisting it was unsafe to transfer detainees to the country’s most secure prison. Adayfi did not note his claims about DeSantis in his memoir; he appears to have first cited it in an interview last November to the podcast Eyes Left. These stories can be a way to absolve white audiences of guilt while also trying to get them to buy tickets for films about communities of which they likely have had limited experience.