A second ex-Guantanamo detainee says Ron DeSantis attended brutal forced feedings

By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org

A second ex-Guantanamo detainee has stepped forward to say that Gov. Ron DeSantis, while a U.S. Navy JAG officer in 2006, watched and allowed the brutal forced feedings of detainees that U.N. human rights authorities, an international physician’s group and others have condemned as a form of torture.

In January, Florida Bulldog reported ex-prisoner Mansoor Adayfi’s account of being force-fed via a painful nasal tube inserted down his throat by Gitmo authorities intent on breaking a hunger strike by dozens of detainees protesting their treatment.

According to Adayfi, DeSantis, a Navy lawyer who told Guantanamo detainees he was there to make sure they were treated humanely, watched in amusement on more than one occasion as he was strapped to a “feeding chair” and cans of Ensure were poured into him as he screamed.

Now, Ahmed Ould Abdel Aziz, known in Guantanamo as detainee #757 during his 13-year internment there without charges, has told Florida Bulldog he repeatedly witnessed DeSantis and “the feeding people” entering cell blocks where “barbaric” force feedings were taking place.

“I wasn’t directly watching Ron DeSantis,” at the feedings, Aziz said. “But we see him entering the blocks beside [us]. The blocks are all aligned…We can see him entering those blocks where they are, you know, feeding people there with that manner of torture. He came with the staff.”

Aziz, 53, said the forced feedings were variously attended by Navy commanders, Army colonels, and one time, even a general. “You need to understand that Ron DeSantis was almost nothing. He was a small man who is following his masters.”

The governor’s office has repeatedly not responded to Florida Bulldog‘s interview requests.

“So, understand this was one of these people, one of these bad people, one of these merciless people, one of these reckless people, one of these sadistic people who enjoy watching people suffering,” said Aziz.

Other former Guantanamo detainees also recognized DeSantis after being shown his photograph, said Adayfi. So far, they have chosen not to be interviewed.

AZIZ REMEMBERS DESANTIS

Neither Adayfi or Aziz knew Ron DeSantis by name in Guantanamo during his service there as a Judge Advocate General, only recognizing his photo years later. Staff at the detention camp don’t use their real names, according to Seton Hall University law professor Mark Denbeaux, a longtime counsel for Gitmo detainees, and Joseph Hickman, a former U.S. Army team leader and Sergeant of the Guard at the prison camp.

Said Aziz, “I participated in the hunger strike, but I did not reach the force feeding process because I chose to drink the liquid that they were, you know, we were forced to drink voluntarily or they would beat you up and, you know, put the big tube in your nose and go through your throat and you will be choking,” said Aziz from his home in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania.

“This person, they call him now Ron DeSantis. He was the same one who was there, but at that time we don’t know his name. But we know that this is the same person,” said Aziz. “He was involved with uh, in, in, in attending, attending, watching and, uh, not recommending to stop or not telling guards not to do that thing. So, he’s definitely supporting them.”

During DeSantis’s first run for governor in 2018, The Tampa Bay Times reported that several retired naval officers who served at the detention camp at the same time as DeSantis said his role with the JAG corps of military lawyers “was to advocate for the fair and humane treatment of the detainees to ensure the U.S. military complied with the law.”

Aydafi has said DeSantis told him that directly. Aziz said JAG officers like DeSantis were “in charge of making sure everything is legal, you know, going with the American rules and that there is no violation of the human rights. But they never write anything against the bad practices that were, you know, conducted in, in Guantanamo at that time…Their job is to watch, then to write what happened and try to defend it or to cover up anything bad.”

The U.S. government released Aziz from Guantanamo in October 2015 and repatriated him to his native Mauritania. That was nearly six years after the Guantanamo Review Task Force, an interagency body whose members included the departments of Justice, Defense, State and Homeland Security, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Director of National Intelligence, unanimously recommended Aziz’s release.

Aziz said he still suffers extreme pain from the brutality he endured and from a lack of medical treatment, including for “serious injuries in my backbone.”

AZIZ ‘HIGH RISK, HIGH VALUE’ DETAINEE

A once confidential Department of Defense memorandum about Aziz, written in February 2008, says he and his wife were captured on June 25, 2002 by Pakistani intelligence operatives during a raid on a suspected al Qaeda safe house in Karachi. Two weeks later he was turned over to U.S. authorities and sent on to Guantanamo on October 28, 2002.

The memo describes Aziz as a college educated “al-Qaida member who swore bayat (oath of loyalty) to Usama Bin Laden in 1999.” He “fought on the front lines in Afghanistan against the Northern Alliance and possibly participated in hostilities against U.S. and Coalition forces.”

The memo said Aziz had “access to information of significant intelligence value but had been uncooperative with interrogators and remains largely unexploited.” As a result, the memo recommended his continued detention as both a high risk “likely to pose a threat to the U.S., its interests and allies” and because of his “high intelligence value.”

Why Aziz was recommended for release just two years later is not known, although there have been other such abrupt turnarounds in U.S. assessments about the value or threats allegedly posed by other detainees.

In 2013, his lawyers wrote a profile of Aziz for Close Guantanamo, noting that in addition to having never been charged with a crime, he’d never been accused of hurting anyone and had no connection to 9/11.

ANOTHER SIDE TO AZIZ

“As a young man he made his living in Kandahar [Afghanistan] by teaching Arabic and Islam to children. He has still never seen or spoken to his son, as his wife was pregnant at the time of his arrest and sale for a bounty. In fact, we brought the first pictures of his son to him. More than anything on earth, Ahmed wants to be with his wife and his son. He wants to help her raise him during the remaining formative years of his life,” wrote John Holland, Anna Holland Edwards and Erica Grossman who share a civil rights law practice in Denver.

“Ahmed is an educated and cultured man. He speaks several languages fluently including French, English and Arabic. He is very engaging, likable and has a very sharp wit. He is also an inveterate reader with widespread interests ranging from literature to physics, to all forms of religious thought, to developments in space, politics, inventions and nature,” they wrote.

Shortly after Aziz’s return to Mauritania in 2015, The Miami Herald reported that his release from Guantanamo had been long delayed by “Pentagon officials wary about letting him go, most recently after the detention center notified the Pentagon that Aziz had declared his intent to join ISIS (the Islamic State also known by its Arabic acronym as Daesh) once he was repatriated. Advocates of his transfer argued that menacing mouthiness should not be a factor on whether a detainee gets out of Guantanamo.”

Such anger at Americans was common among detainees who were held for years without charges or justice and were further embittered by what they contend was their physical and mental mistreatment, even torture.

Aziz’s joyous return to Mauritania in 2015 was captured by local news crews. Since then, he appears to have steered clear of ISIS, although ISIS hasn’t steered clear of him and his countrymen.

AZIZ’S TRAGEDY

During an interview last week, after exchanging texts since late February via Whats App, Aziz said he was forced to communicate with Florida Bulldog via an audio file using a neighbor’s satellite Wi-Fi.

“There is some, you know, some bad violence going on between government and some of these extremists from Daesh. They killed some guards and they are, they fled and they are hiding inside the town…There is a big alert going on at Nouakchott right now. So they cut the net,” Aziz said.

Africanews.com reported, “At 9 pm on 5 March 2023, four terrorists managed to escape from the central prison in Nouakchott after attacking the guards, which led to an exchange of fire during which two members of the National Guard” died and two others were slightly injured, the Interior Ministry said in a statement.”

Internet service was restored Saturday, Aziz said. But the Jihadist violence and government crackdown has unfolded against Aziz’s own personal tragedy.

On March 2, his beloved eldest son Mohamed, the son whose birth he did not get to see because he was in U.S. custody, died suddenly and inexplicably.

“My little son has died of sudden COMA. He was just twenty. My wife is devastated and barely can talk,” Aziz wrote. “We are in mourning in this period of time.”