Theo Padnos
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Theo Padnos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The Western governments are on the side of the torturers, and I don't understand this.
My life is in very, very, very grave danger. I have three days. They're giving me three days to live. Three days.
I am the luckiest victim of this war, and there's hundreds of thousands of them. Of course, many have been killed, but many of the survivors of the torture and the detention on both sides of this civil war, they emerge and they have nothing. They almost have no place to go back to. The people who I was in prison with, I don't think that they were well-received.
Those few that got out, it was like, shut up, don't talk about this, go home, and we might need you in the Army again.
The same individuals. I mean, I see them on video. I go, oh, that's Abu Hamza.
Yes. The people who are in charge of the nation right now, when I knew them, they were terrorists and sadists. And now they're You know, they've rebranded. And I think that, you know, in a way, what we want is a monopoly of force. We want peace. We want the most possible peace as soon as possible for the most people. And so in order to accomplish that, you have to have a monopoly of force.
And for a while I thought, give it to whoever is the most likely to have it. Right now it's Al Qaeda torturers. They're comporting themselves, you know, like relatively decently at the moment.
And they're taking prisoners now, as we can see across Twitter on video. They take the enemies of God and they put them in jail, and most of them they're going to kill because they believe a lot of the enemies are beyond redemption. But there's some, they think, like me, they were like, he's not so far gone that we can't redeem him.
But in order to redeem that person, it's like they put you... Why were you not so far gone? Because he spoke Arabic? Because their true enemies are the Alawites and the Shia. And those people are like beyond the pale. And they figured that I could possibly, like they didn't know what kind of sins I had committed in the past. My sin was being an American.
They felt that I was like a libertine that had gone around sleeping with women all the time. And also I was selfish. I wanted money. Why did you come to Syria? For journalism. Why do you want to do journalism? You wanted money. You wanted to advance yourself. You were like self-involved and self-interested. Well, you know, in a way it was true. I was dreaming of getting a commission for 200 bucks.
But they were like, you're greedy. Why can't you sacrifice yourself for the people like we're doing?
I met some people in Turkey, in Antakya, Turkey, and they said, listen, we are fixtures for journalists and we ourselves are journalists, which was kind of true. They were journalists for Jabhat al-Nusra. They were like doing the self-promotion for Jabhat al-Nusra. They took a lot of photographs and I eventually made friends with these guys on Facebook.
And, you know, I saw all their journalistic work, which it is a kind of journalism they're doing. But did you know their affiliation? No, they were like, they did not say, by the way, we're from Tanzim Al-Qaeda. That's what they call it, the Al-Qaeda system. But when we crossed the border, we slept the first night in like an abandoned house.
We woke up the next morning and we drove to another abandoned house. And they set up a sort of a scenario roughly like this.
Cameras and microphone. And they're like, let's do an interview. And in the midst of this interview, they came over and kind of jumped on me and started kicking me. And then they put a gun in my face. And during that assault, they handcuffed my hands behind my back. Like a moment later, when I regained consciousness, my face was covered in blood. And a guy was pointing a gun at me.
And he goes, you're a prisoner now. meaning you're our prisoner, and they took my iPhone out of my pocket, and they go, this is ghanayim, that's war booty. And they said, we belong to the al-Qaeda organization, and you killed our sheikh, Osama bin Laden. And furthermore, you people are imperialists.
Because these guys were amateurs. What happened is these people were amateurs and they pretended to belong to the al-Qaeda organization, which was the only terrorist faction in Syria at the time. But they were just amateur hoodlums, wannabe fanboys of ISIS, al-Qaeda. So during the night, that first night, I slept in the same bed with a guy. He handcuffed me, like the chief kidnapper, to his wrist.
And in the morning... when they wake up for the , which is the dawn prayer, I go, hey, man, this handcuff is like a little tight on my wrist. Can you just loosen it up? He goes, no problem. He loosened it up a little bit, went back to sleep. And as he was sleeping, I pulled my hand out of the handcuff, and then I was free. I was lying next to this terrorist.
And there was a terrorist in another room, and they all had guns. So I stood up. And I walked very carefully to the door, opened the door, and then I ran out into the street like a madman. I had never been so frightened in my life.
I had no idea where I was. I was in the midst of a town called Marat Misrin, it turns out. I went straight to the local police force. I said, bring me to the Jaisal Har, that's the Free Syrian Army. Allegedly, they were on our side. So I said, please, help me, save me. I've been kidnapped by these horrible al-Qaeda people.
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