9/14/2023 0 Comments Whats an rssOne day, as we continued our strike with the hope that change is just around the corner, a naval judge advocate general (JAG), whom I later learned to be DeSantis, walked the blocks with other new arrivals. By 2006, news about our hunger strike was finally getting out. In 2005, almost all prisoners in the camp started participating in a hunger strike to protest against torture, inhumane treatment, and being held indefinitely without even being charged with a crime. When I first saw DeSantis, I was on a hunger strike. Even after spending the previous few years working on my memoir, which meant reliving everything I had been through at Guantanamo, seeing his face again triggered a lot of pain in me too. Some said seeing his face again triggered painful memories of the trauma they suffered during their imprisonment. Several replied that they too remembered his face from Guantanamo. 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.Īfter finding a Miami Herald article in which DeSantis bragged about his service at Guantanamo and confirming that my memory is correct, I sent his photo to a group chat of former detainees. I do not remember what the post was about – probably something about him clashing with President Joe Biden over COVID policies. It was Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. In 2021, just as my memoir – Don’t Forget Us Here, Lost and Found at Guantanamo – was about to be published, I was on Twitter and saw a photo of a handsome man in a white navy uniform. So many military staffers and guards passed through Guantanamo during my 14-year detention that I remember only the kindest, and the cruellest – the ones who seemed to take joy in our misery.
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