After they locked his body into a truck tire. After they cuffed his hands behind his back, then flipped him over so his weight rested on his knees and forehead. After they poured water over him, then beat his feet and hands with steel cables. That’s when Theo Padnos confessed to helping the CIA kill Islamic terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, to being gay, to helping the CIA get the goods on al Qaeda in Syria, and to his desire to rape Syrian women.
None of this was true.
“The ideal torturer in an Islamic state is someone who takes himself out of the act entirely,” says Padnos, whose new book, Blindfold: A Memoir of Capture, Torture and Enlightenment, tells of the nearly two years he was held as a prisoner by al Qaeda in Syria. “[The torturer] does his bit without emotion. The vast majority of them thought of torture as work they had to do to purify Syria of bad elements that had crept into the nation during the time of the Assads.”
