‘Totally B.S.’: Ron DeSantis denies claims of force feeding while serving at Guantanamo Bay

As Gov. Ron DeSantis met with the Israeli press, he rebuked a sharp question about his military service as “totally B.S.”

Asked about his service at Guantanamo Bay during the War on Terror in 2006, DeSantis forcefully denied claims from an Israeli reporter that he “attended the force-feeding” of Al Qaeda captives while on site as a legal advisor.

“No, no, all that’s B.S. Totally. Totally BS,” DeSantis said. “Who said that?”

The reporting cited below came from the London Independent.

The paper reported in March that a former prisoner, Mansoor Adayfi, claimed DeSantis “observed his brutal force-feeding by guards during a hunger strike in 2006 — a practice the United Nations characterized as torture.”

“Do you honestly believe that’s credible? So this is 2006, I’m a junior officer. Do you honestly think that they would have remembered me from Adam? Of course not. They’re just trying to get into the news, because they know people like you will consume it, because it fits the pre-ordained narrative that you’re trying to spin.”

Adayfi offered his take in Al Jazeera earlier this year, contending he indeed remembered DeSantis, even after nearly two decades.

“I was on Twitter and saw a photo of a handsome man in a white navy uniform. It was Ron DeSantis, the Governor of Florida,” said Adayfi.

“I do not 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 had seen that face for the first time in Guantanamo, in 2006 — one of the camp’s darkest years when the authorities started violently breaking hunger strikes and three of my brothers were found dead in their cages.”

The Governor’s story (or “narrative”) has shifted over time.

Back in 2018, DeSantis said that for detainees, “the jihad was still ongoing” and given the hunger strikes, “everything was legal one way or another.”

“You actually can force feed, things like that,” he told CBS back then.

DeSantis had previously addressed the allegations in a somewhat friendlier venue, flatly denying any authorization of force-feeding as “wrong.”

“I was a junior officer. I didn’t have authority to authorize anything,” DeSantis told Piers Morgan in March. “There may have been a commander that would have done feeding if someone was going to die, but that was not something that I would have even had authority to do.”

DeSantis said GTMO was a “professionally run prison” where “some guys were in open air, playing soccer…”

“It’s a tough thing when you have a situation with terrorism and war,” said DeSantis, adding that he expected “military commissions” but they just “sputtered.”