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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Yes. That is the literal definition.
Yeah. I mean, I had lived through many episodes of their violence by this point. So this was what occurred then was not particularly agonizing. But it was terrifying because they flung me down at the feet of their sheikh. And he said, I will kill you by my own hand this afternoon because you betrayed me. And in fact, he didn't because he knew he was going to get money.
He'd already been in negotiations with the nation of Qatar apparently. But yeah, it was more terrifying.
I was a sack of money. And there's another thing that the journalists who are wandering around Syria at the moment don't understand, which is that there's not really... It's a failed state. It's like there's no central authority. Jolani appears to be in control, but every guy who drives a pickup is an entrepreneur as well, and he needs sacks of money. Why does he need this?
Because he's got 10 guys in the back, and they need bullets and falafel. They need to eat, and they need weapons and guns, otherwise they won't be powerful. Otherwise those 10 guys in the back are going to go off to the guy who does have money. So everybody needs cash, and the journalists represent, or any foreigner represents an enormous sack of cash.
The only thing standing in the way of kidnapping those journalists at the moment is that there is nothing in the Quran that says, go kidnap journalists. And they feel it might be wrong. They need to get a special authorization from an authority, but... I think they can get it if they want it.
I have deep sympathy for Deborah Tice and the whole Tice family. I mean, I know them, of course. And they have been through something horrible and terrible and one wants to sympathize. At the same time, all the available evidence that we have... shows that he is in the hands of the mujahideen, the Jabhat al-Nusra people, and that he is trying to placate them by saying, there is no God but God.
This is what they make you say in the instance before they kill you. Why do they do this? Because they believe that if you go to heaven... With these words on your lips, it's possible that God will believe you have converted to Islam, your soul is clean, all your sins are wiped away, and he will accept you into paradise. You live forever with the virgins.
So the last thing they do before they kill people is they make you say, It's like a gesture of charity for them. They're giving you this chance at heaven. Anyway, all the evidence suggests that this person was captured by them at that time and place. in which they were active and they were taking prisoners. I know this because some of the people who were in my prison were captured then and there.
No, I'm saying that the available evidence we have is that he was taken by Mujahideen.
And they did something with him. We don't know what they did, but it looks very dangerous and frightening what they appear to be doing. After this video appeared... Are you convinced that he's still alive too? No.
Not at all. After this video appeared on the internet, all the journalists looking at this said, it can't be what we think it is. It must be the Assad government because... The rebels, first of all, they don't dress like this. By the way, they do dress like that. They wouldn't take an American prisoner. By the way, they were looking for American prisoners.
I was captured like four weeks after he was captured. So he was also in the military. If I had been in the military, the first thing they wanted to know about me is like, that is the crime for which they can kill you because you have been killing their friends in Iraq.
The people who are in charge of Syria now, they developed their identity by fighting the Americans in Tanzim al-Qaeda, the al-Qaeda organization in Iraq. So if they were to catch an American military guy in Syria, they would go, these are the guys that have been killing our friends. Now we're going to kill him.
The real issue is that we could not fathom there is some other form of evil freeing the land in Syria. We go, it must be Assad. It must be Assad. And in fact, you know, the evidence suggests, no, it wasn't Assad, but we can't see that evidence. We can't make sense of it.
I mean, I think we have so little understanding of what's happening in that country.
I mean, they assume that there's one person in control. They assume, oh, now these people are in control and they will all take orders from that guy. That's not how it works. It's like if you put 10 of those guys on a soccer field and ask them to coordinate and play soccer together, they wouldn't do it. The only thing that keeps them together is cash. And each guy gets paid from his commander.
And provided that money keeps coming, they're going to be loyal to that guy. But they don't have enough cash to hold the whole country together.
No, I mean, this is quite an extraordinary... How did it happen? Exactly.
I mean, I think when wars are won, it's because you exhaust the other party's will to fight. The Syrian government's army, they were like, we're not doing this anymore.
Showing 101–120 of 157 · page 6 of 8
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