Milwaukee attorney Art Heitzer speaks at the protest conducted at the Republican Primary Debate on August 23^rd.

Remarks by Arthur Heitzer at the #protest at last week’s #RepublicanDebate in Milwaukee, exposing Ron DeSantis’ direct role in torture at the US operated prison camp in Guantanamo Bay #Cuba, and how crimes abroad lead to crimes at home.

Denounce Torturer DeSantis! US Out of Guantánamo Now!

Crimes Abroad Lead to Crimes at Home!

Over 100 years ago, the US government began its illegal occupation of the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba. Even under the coerced terms the US imposed on Cuba, this territory was to be used “exclusively“ as a naval base and re-fueling station.

Guantánamo has now become a detention facility, and since 2012, as an infamous center of torture and abuse of people kidnapped from all over the world and taken there — precisely because the US administration asserted that at Gitmo, “no law” applied.

Ron DeSantis admits that he personally supervised the treatment and interrogation of prisoners, which amounted to torture in clear violation of medical and legal ethics, according to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and many others.

Despite this, Ron DeSantis has never apologized in the slightest for his actions, and has been a leading supporter of keeping this detention camp open indefinitely.

The vast majority of the detainees there have never been charged or convicted of any wrongdoing. Many were sent there because the US offered large bounties to warlords in Afghanistan and elsewhere to turn in other people.

Former detainees who were tortured there have reported that DeSantis personally supervised their torture, that he was smiling while they were being force-fed. DeSantis was also part of an apparent cover-up in the death of three prisoners due to so-called “enhanced interrogations,” and then blamed the torture victims for attempting to wage a propaganda war against the US.

We call on DeSantis to withdraw from this race! We demand that ALL of the candidates denounce such torture and call for immediately closing the Guantánamo prison camp, and to return Guantánamo to Cuba!

Finally, it is important to recognize that crimes and torture committed abroad lead to crimes at home. For example, in Chicago an entire police unit under the infamous Commander Jon Burge routinely applied torture techniques they learned and practiced in Vietnam, in order to force false confessions from over 100 Black men from the 1970s to the 1990s. This resulted in multiple wrongful convictions and long prison terms that were only overturned years later, as documented in the Chicago Police Torture Archive.com.