October 29, 2014

"I'm not sure how long this beating lasted — perhaps an hour, perhaps only 20 minutes. Toward the end..."

"... I heard the leader approach and braced myself for another blow. It didn’t come. Instead, he knelt close to me and whispered in my ear: 'I hate Americans. All of them. I hate you all.' After this, I lost track of time. I dreamed that the fighters were rolling my body in a winding sheet and lashing my ankles together with golden straw. In the days after this dream, I thought, I have seen the winding sheet, so I must be quite far along in the killing process. But every time I asked myself if I was alive or dead, the answer came back, You are most certainly alive. I thought, The custom must be to wrap the corpses in the winding sheets before they are entirely dead. How peculiar. I didn’t know."

From "My Captivity/Theo Padnos, American Journalist, on Being Kidnapped, Tortured and Released in Syria" (in the NYT).

36 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow.

Tarrou said...

RELIGION OF PEACE YOU RACISTS!

MadisonMan said...

Compelling reading, thanks for directing me to it.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

What a horrible, but common, human experience.

madAsHell said...

I didn't finish reading his account. I'm sure it is a mixture of fiction, and fact that advances a victim narrative. The narrative will undoubtedly leave me with a new understanding of who the real victims are.

David said...

Didn't his captors have lawyers embedded to tell them whether what they were doing was legal?

BarrySanders20 said...

This part is revealing for its mixture of curiosity and hubris (hubriosity?):

"I believed I knew my way around the Arab world. In 2004, when the United States was mired in the war in Iraq, I decided to embark on a private experiment. I moved from Vermont to Sana, the Yemeni capital, to study Arabic and Islam. I was good with languages — I had a Ph.D. in comparative literature — and I was eager to understand a world where the West often seemed to lose its way."

Oh that dreaded lost way of the west.

MadisonMan said...

I had a Ph.D. in comparative literature

That jumped out at me too. You never know your way around the world, despite what you've learned.

gspencer said...

Good job, NYT.

A 9000 word article and not a bad thing to say about the ideology that motivates any one of these Muslims.

You keep telling us it's a religion of peace, but the beatings, the cruelty, and the murders keep getting in the way.

Greg Hlatky said...

I was told by my betters that we had to elect Obama so the world would like us again.

RecChief said...

I didn't read it. I've had enough of embedded "journalists" to last me to the end of my days. But I guess that is the path for people who want to write Social Justice paperbacks.

I'm assuming somewhere in his column inches is some kind of bullshit that absolves his kidnappers/torturers and explains why they hate us.

Achilles said...

This is all America's fault. Probably Micro-aggresions.

Krumhorn said...

It's hard to stir up much sympathy for the fella. As the saying goes, if you sleep with dogs, don't be surprised when you wake up while one of them is humping your leg.

Or something like that.

- Krumhorn

sane_voter said...

OT:
Walker 50
Burke 43

Latest MU poll

Quaestor said...

To be hated by barbarians is an intrinsic Good. If I spent the time and money to earn a doctorate in comparative literature and didn't learn that along the way I'd ask for my money back.

Evidently Theo Padnos has failed to learn the basics of manhood. When confronted by the leader of a milling crowd of jihadi scum the correct answer to the question "do you know who I am?" is "I don't care."

Quaestor said...

Reasons to worry:

1) Barbarians don't hate you. This means you are one of two things: (a) Acceptable and likely a barbarian yourself (b) Negligible.

2) Barbarians hate you, but don't fear you. Al Qaeda also hates Russians, but they don't fuck with Russians.

Dave Schumann said...

Probably didn't give them the right kind of bathrooms. What a cisnormative microaggressor.

richard mcenroe said...

But...but... wet towels!

Revenant said...

A 9000 word article and not a bad thing to say about the ideology that motivates any one of these Muslims.

Well, let's be fair. Who hasn't wanted to give the occasional comparative literature PhD a good beating?

Revenant said...

2) Barbarians hate you, but don't fear you. Al Qaeda also hates Russians, but they don't fuck with Russians.

Al Qaeda was of the opinion that they'd already defeated the Russians, when the latter pulled out of Afghanistan.

Also, ISIS is specifically fucking with Russia's #1 Middle Eastern client -- the Assad regime in Syria.

Quaestor said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Quaestor said...

Also, ISIS is specifically fucking with Russia's #1 Middle Eastern client -- the Assad regime in Syria.

If the fact that Assad is Russia's client means what you evidently think it means, then explain why there are no Russian captives being held by ISIS or its affiliates, even though there are thousands of Russian advisors, diplomats and journalists in Syria -- a wealth of targets.

Presumably it would advance the ISIS strategy if the Russians could be intimidated into abandoning their stake in the game -- force out the Russians out and Assad's army bleeds to death -- yet they're not playing that winning card, are they?

BarrySanders20 said...

"In addition, the fighters told me, both sides believe that 50,000 years ago, Allah decreed that they should die in exactly this way, at exactly this instant in history."

No wonder Barry is having a hard time reasoning with these folks.

And to be fair, W thought he could bring democracy to the region. Nope, not gonna happen. Gotta change the mindset first, and that might take a while.

YoungHegelian said...

The folks (nowadays almost always of some multi-culti strain) who think they can wander without harm among the barbarian because, "gosh, I'm not like my fellow Americans -- I'm really open to other people & cultures" always amaze me.

If you're so open to other cultures, why don't you start by understanding that they really don't give a shit about what kind of a sweetheart American you think you are. You are the oppressor incarnate, and they will hurt you if they can. Maybe, just maybe, one's national character can't just be thrown aside like an old pair of sneakers.

NotWhoIUsedtoBe said...

Nothing happens until someone with a Western education writes about it.

How many people have been tortured in Syria? Tens of thousands? More?

Achilles said...

John Lynch said...
"Nothing happens until someone with a Western education writes about it.

How many people have been tortured in Syria? Tens of thousands? More?"

Nothing happens until the US gets involved. Then it was all our fault for getting involved.

Titus said...

This is the group John McCain wants us to arm.

Achilles said...

Titus said...

"This is the group John McCain wants us to arm"

McCain wants it. Hillary did it.

Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...

Revenant said...
Well, let's be fair. Who hasn't wanted to give the occasional comparative literature PhD a good beating?


Apparently it's a common feeling.

Revenant said...

then explain why there are no Russian captives being held by ISIS or its affiliates, even though there are thousands of Russian advisors, diplomats and journalists in Syria -- a wealth of targets.

There are no Russian hostages being held because ISIS murdered the one they had earlier this year. Presumably because ISIS was just too darn scared of Russia, and the hostage kept making them nervous by flexing his bear-like Russian muscles.

As for why Russians don't get kidnapped as often, that's because they are usually under military protection. American and British reporters, on the other hand, are unofficial representatives of nations that both sides of the conflict loathe, and enjoy no protections whatsoever.

Revenant said...

You are the oppressor incarnate, and they will hurt you if they can. Maybe, just maybe, one's national character can't just be thrown aside like an old pair of sneakers.

This makes them some of the only people on Earth who would actually benefit from reading Crack's blog.

Paul said...

Well someone needs to inform that Muslim torturer that hate is a two way street.

And as the Japanese found in WW2, Americans can hate real well when they get their dander up.

Sebastian said...

"Americans can hate real well when they get their dander up"

True, but we haven't yet, not really.

9/11 was too small an attack to trigger mass hate.

Iraq and Afghanistan were not sufficiently painful.

ISIS is bad but --not JV but minor league (so far!).

And of course the domestic fifth columns have done their best to prevent a good old hating. Iraq was Bush's war, Islam is the religion of peace, Muslims are the Other deserving of multiculti respect, jihad really stands for inner striving, and so on.

All Americans are allowed to hate is "terror," as in the "war on terror." And Barry has made even that euphemism taboo.

vza said...

“Oh, that,” one said. “We lied to the Americans about that.”

Get out of the Middle East. Mind our own business. We do not know what we are doing. We never have.

Rusty said...

"I believed I knew my way around the Arab world. In 2004, when the United States was mired in the war in Iraq, I decided to embark on a private experiment. I moved from Vermont to Sana, the Yemeni capital, to study Arabic and Islam. I was good with languages — I had a Ph.D. in comparative literature — and I was eager to understand a world where the West often seemed to lose its way."


And then his REAL education began. I sincerly doubt he learned anything.

Kirk Parker said...

"I moved from Vermont to Sana, the Yemeni capital, to study Arabic and Islam. I was good with languages — I had a Ph.D. in comparative literature — and I was eager to understand a world where the West often seemed to lose its way."

Comparative Literature? The ghost of Richard Burton pukes...