The dumbest man on television?
The neoconservative uberpundit Bill Kristol continues to have theories on why he continues to find an American program of torturing detainees
untroubling.
[Bill Kristol told] Newsmax TV host Steve Malzberg today that Republicans should emulate Dick Cheney’s recent media tour in defense of the agency’s treatment of detainees.
According to Kristol, CIA detainees didn’t experience “real torture” and merely endured “unpleasant” interrogation that “you recover from and seems to have no lasting effects at all.”
Or, as counterpoint,
some of those not-lasting effects:
When his Ulm attorney and confidant Manfred Gnjidic last saw [German citizen Khalid al Masri], he was broke, unkempt, paranoid and completely alone. He’d been arrested twice and sent once to a psychiatric ward, once to jail. He was in deep need of psychological counseling but with no hope of the extensive help he needed. [...]
The Senate report does not discuss his treatment in detention. But al Masri has insisted over the years that he was tortured. He’s described being shackled to the ceiling while naked, unable to sit for days, existing on nothing, in the dark, a scenario that appears to be common in the torture report. A European court ruled in 2012 that he’d been sodomized and drugged.
Al Masri, previously a "grocer and mechanic", was taken from Europe to a secret CIA facility in Afghanistan known as the "Salt Pit" where he underwent "enhanced interrogation." It was a case of mistaken identity. It destroyed his life, his mental health and cost him his family; by 2009 the previously law-abiding man had been arrested twice for violence and believed that he was being followed by secret agents. So no, it seems he did not "recover."
This really isn't hard information to find. Bill Kristol continues to fancy himself a deep foreign policy thinker, but even he must get tired of being so consistently wrong about everything on which he offers an opinion.