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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
That's right. And we had a thing called Operation Timber Sycamore at the time. We were pouring millions and millions of dollars into their pockets. So theoretically, they ought to have been on our side.
But anyway, I arrived at this police station. They said, oh, great, thank you for coming. Have a cup of tea. Nice to see you. We're going to just have a little discussion and figure out who you really are. And then they went out and found the kidnappers, and the kidnappers said, he's a spy. He's an American. Well, you know, look how he speaks Arabic. during the arrest, they beat me.
It's like, how could a guy speak Arabic like this without having been trained by the CIA? I'm like, I spent my stupid, every last bit of pocket change I had to study this damn language.
Yeah, we went to the Islamic court, the Shara'i. That's the court of the law, of God. And this guy interviewed the kidnappers. In an Islamic court, you have two witnesses for the prosecution. And those were my kidnappers. There was no lawyer. And the two witnesses testified against me that I was indeed a spy. They talked to the judge for like 40 minutes.
And the judge came into a room with all the Jaisal Hora guys, all the Free Syrian Army guys. He goes, you're going to have to provide me with a translator. I go, don't worry, judge. I speak Arabic. No problem. I don't need a translator. It was like a capital crime. I was being tried basically for spying. I didn't know this.
Well, the right thing to do when you're being tried for capital crime, the thing that they could kill you for is to delay, stall, just don't let it happen. But I'm like, no, I'm going to talk to him. He's going to see that I'm innocent. He's going to be reasonable. He also recorded me on video like this. They record everything they do on video. He's like, ask me a few questions.
I told him I had been in Yemen studying Arabic and studying Islam. He's like, spy, spy, spy. And it took, you know, my testimony was like five minutes. And then he called the soldier. He goes, put him in the basement. They brought me down into a toilet in the basement. And they locked the door. It was like about the size of this chair. You couldn't lie down in it.
There was poop all over the place. And I poked my head out of the little food hatch. And there was a guy in a cell next to me. And I go, man, what did you do? Like, what's your crime? He goes, we're Shia. We're Shia. So I'm like, jeez, this seems like a religious sort of organization. And within the next minutes, I was in the hands of Mohammed Adnani, who was the author of the Bataclan attacks.
In Paris, and the guy who burned to death the Jordanian pilot was, Qasasbi. His headquarters were in a nearby town there. And he took me to really kind of the cradle, the birth of the Islamic State, a little farmhouse. There was a bunch of Iraqi guys, a bunch of French guys there. And for me, that's when the real torture began, like the—
The torture today was not, it was not Nizami as this, not systematic. But once you get in the hands of the actual Al-Qaeda men, they know how to do it properly. At first, I was so ashamed of what they had done to me. I was like, I can never tell anybody this. I tried to hang myself. This is another thing I was very ashamed of. They put me in such a psychological condition.
You tried to hang yourself in captivity. Yeah, I was like, I don't want to do this, but I have to. And after that, I was ashamed about this. It's like part of what happens in these prisons, and I'm sure it happens in the government prisons too, is they degrade you to the status of an animal. You are dirt, you are filth, you are life that doesn't deserve to live.
The torture, it's like if you knew that it was going to be 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and that you're going to come out alive, you'd be like, okay, no problem, I'll deal with it. But you don't know this. And they put you through it once, and then they bring you back to the cell, and they go, tomorrow it's going to be worse because you lied to us.
Yes. Yeah, I don't think that all the journalists who are wandering around Syria at the moment, I mean, I suspect that higher-ups, and I know that the higher-ups in Jabhat al-Nusra, which is now Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, they are certain that all those people are reporting back to the CIA. They don't care. They're like, fine, you know, we have a decent system.
Our intentions are good, so tell the CIA whatever you want to tell them. When they speak to their journalist, they go... You know, please, in their minds, they're saying, and relay all this to your paymasters at the CIA, you Jew. That's what they're thinking, but they're not saying that. You are Jewish, right? I have a Jewish father, but I was not raised as a Jew.
No, but my cellmate, I had a cellmate for a little while. a guy called Schreier, who's American, who himself was a Jew. I didn't know this at the time, but we all have secrets, you know? There's a lot of stuff you don't want to tell these guys, because you don't know how they're going to react. And in fact- But you have a paper trail.
Of course. The worst thing that I did was I wrote a book called Undercover Muslim. In fact, Adnani did discover this. And he came into my cell at one point and he said, we know you've written a book. He goes, what was the title of your stupid book, you idiot? I'm like, gee, I forget. And I told him a lie. I could not utter those words. It's called undercover Muslim.
But he said to his friends who were there, he said, he's been spying on our brothers in Yemen. I'm like, I guess that's the end. They know everything.
The reason why I wanted to talk about the suicide is not because it was an expression of my despair. It's a systematic thing they do to everybody. They want everybody to give up on the life that you're living now. Completely die to your past and to your names. They give you like a new name. And for the first like year and a half, I was dirt. I was filth. That was the name? Yeah.
In Arabic. So you die to your past in order for you to reawaken someday with an orientation as they are oriented. All the hostages converted without exception. Did you? And I never did convert. You didn't even fake a conversion. I did not fake a conversion, nothing. If they had a gun to my head and they said, we will spare you, but you have to convert, I would have done it.
But they never came to that. At first, as I say, I was very ashamed of what they were doing to me, the condition to which they reduced me. I blame myself for having gone to Syria in the first place. What was I thinking? I wasn't a success in the journalism world by any means. And I imagined that I was going to go in there and start sending pictures out to editors and blah, That was stupid.
Showing 21–40 of 157 · page 2 of 8
← Previous
Next →