Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (22 page)

I laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“Anyway, you have to try her food. It’s amazing.”

Scratching chickens, bleating goats, and black-shrouded women picked their way through dust and trash at the squalid market in the provincial town of Shibaam Kawkaban. We slipped down an alley and into a courtyard. A silent girl smiled and led us up a sagging and shadowed staircase, and into a light-flooded lounge. Windows yawned open on all sides, to rocks and mountains and hawks dipping in air.
We sat on pillows and the woman laid down a spread of meats, eggs, vegetables, and hot, rich bread. When the tea arrived, Faris pulled out a bundle of qat. “You said you were interested in qat,” he said, passing me a handful of branches.

“I am.”

“Well, it’s Friday. Everybody chews qat today. Break off the smallest leaves, the green, flexible leaves. Chew them but don’t swallow them. Push them over into your cheek and suck on the juices.”

This was the last day Faris would waste, I coaxed myself. The translator I’d hired the night before was already fixing appointments. It was Friday anyway, a futile time for work. I stuffed my mouth with qat, sucked on bitter juice, and watched the hawks rise and fall, suspended against a sky blasted white by sun.

“It’s very good for you to spend time with Faris,” Mohammed, the translator, had told me hesitantly. “He can help you a lot, if he wants.”
But he probably won’t
. Those words hung, unspoken, in his tone.

Black birds wheeled, shadows thinned, and the monochrome glaze of a sun tacked straight overhead coated the mountains. Soggy qat burrowed into my cheek. Leaves slipped off down my throat. Then my head began to hum and I didn’t care. I’d let go of terrorism and burn a day in this forgotten place.

We rode through long plains and valleys, back toward Sanaa, and Faris talked about his kids and the foreign wife he’d married and divorced. He’d settled now with a Yemeni wife and that was working because she understood him. We drew to the edge of the capital and I leafed through his CDs until I found a Snoop Doggy Dogg album,
Doggystyle
. “You like this?”

“Yeah, I love Snoop,” he said.

“I haven’t heard it since high school,” I said.

“Let’s listen to it.”

The sun slanted down on the old city and Snoop Doggy Dogg slurred, “Loddi doddi, we likes to party …” and the music spilled out of the car windows and puddled in the streets, drawing eyes after us. Men in tribal skirts stood still and stared out of hard-edged faces, as if they had been standing there for all time, legs gnawed down to the bone, bunches of foliage big as baseballs bulging in their cheeks. They stood, stared, and sucked on their leaves. I was lost in glittering futility now,
coming to the end of the first dead end, the great waste of trying to know something of Yemen and know it quickly, know it now. Glazed by Arabian sun, sheened in dust, estranged from facts, I was looking for things I could not see. The war on terror was happening now, on all sides, and lives were slipping past us unseen. “Murder was the case they gave me,” Snoop murmured, and day crumbled into night.

Back in Cairo, the Yemeni foreign minister had boasted to me that American agents had free run of Yemeni prisons. They could watch the interrogations and, presumably, absorb any information spilled under torture. Why would the United States bother kidnapping people and spiriting them into hidden prisons if they had a setup like that? Of course, they had rendered Yemenis anyway—presumably those the government wouldn’t relinquish. America had given Yemen plenty of money and military equipment to fight terrorism at the turn of the new century, after the USS
Cole
was bombed by Yemeni Islamists while refueling in the harbor of Aden. Seventeen American sailors died in the attack. More American cash flowed to Yemen after September 11. There were rumors that bin Laden might be hiding here, embedded among his tribe. Nobody believed it. And yet when you got to Yemen, torn by civil war and crippled by poverty, you felt yourself so far off the map, so deep in a lawless land, that anything at all seemed potentially true.

The next morning in Sanaa, I watched a human rights lawyer named Mohammed Naji Allaw take down file after file, spread them between us, and read off the names of men who’d been detained, disappeared, or opaquely incarcerated. The government had warned him against investigating renditions, he said. He seemed at a loss for whom to resent more, the Americans or his own government.

“The governments in the Arab and Islamic worlds work as police stations now for the United States, and still they are bad police stations,” he sighed. “A police station in New York is more able to say no to an order from the American government than any government in this region. The governments don’t even follow their own constitutions.”

Yemenis had vanished while traveling overseas, only to turn up in Guantánamo. Forty families had been arrested and interrogated by
Yemeni intelligence because they had relatives in Guantánamo. Yemenis were being held in Yemeni prisons without charge because the Americans wanted them in custody, he said.

“They keep people hidden and don’t allow people to visit relatives. Solitary confinement. Sleep deprivation. Kicks and slaps. They threaten to attack their families.”

I wanted to talk with the families. He sighed and shook his head. He would try, he said, but they were afraid to talk, because nobody knew how far this would go.

“This is totally different from what was going on before September 11,” he said. “The United States used to put a lot of pressure on governments to improve human rights. It was believed to be the country that protected human rights. Activists and journalists used to use the United States as a backup, as something to keep them strong against their governments, and the governments tried to beautify their images before the Americans. Now the United States turns a blind eye. The State Department issues an annual report, but there’s no punishment behind the report. Now, when we try to challenge our government about a detention case, they say, ‘Look, see, there’s your glorious example at work.’ They say, ‘Because we are not strong enough to face the United States, we are obliged to do what they ask.’ It’s not acceptable to anybody, but this is really happening.”

“This is an important interview,” Mohammed the translator announced as we drove through the dust and clotting darkness. Hamood Abdulhamed Hitar was a prominent judge and head of the newly formed theological committee. “He is a very big judge, an important man,” Mohammed told me. A proudly displayed sheep pelt slid along the dashboard as he swung the wheel. “He can answer all of your questions, about terrorists, everything.”

“And renditions?”

He tightened his lips.

“I think so, yes.” He paused. “Maybe he will talk with us quickly, because now it’s time for chewing qat.”

Each Yemeni afternoon dissolves into qat, the balm and consolation for another day endured. “Did you chew qat before?” he asked.

“A little the other day.”

“Did you like it?”

“Yes.” It wasn’t polite to admit that it had given me a mediocre buzz and a splitting headache.

Frames of light etched the windows and doors of the judge’s house, chasing off the gloaming. We doffed our shoes at the threshold and padded into the
mafraj
, a qat-chewing salon swaddled in carpets and strewn with cushions. There he was, the high court judge and soon-to-be cabinet minister, luxuriating on thick pillows, the spoils of trees spread about.

“
Salaam aleikum
,” I said.

“
Aleikum salaam
,” he replied.

Islamic greetings thus dispensed, I sank down into the cushions. Mohammed pulled out his own bundle of qat, and handed me a few branches.

“Tell me about the work you do.” I tried to poke the leaves out of the path of my tongue.

The judge combed his fingers through glossy leaves. “I’m in charge of holding dialogue with those returning from Afghanistan and those with extremist ideas which are uncommon to people …” He trailed off. I slid my eyes over to Mohammed, who stared serenely at our host. Head hung low, the judge pored over the qat branches. Then he roused himself with a shake, and slipped back into the interview:

“I talk to people with extremist ideas whether they went to Afghanistan or not,” he said by way of clarification, and gazed indistinctly at the air between us.

“When they came back they were under security supervision and security knows that and from the way of common speeches and ideas it’s obvious they have extremist ideas,” he finally said.

I copied this incoherency down and looked up to find his bloodshot eyes flickering expectantly. The question, his gaze announced imperiously, had been duly answered. I looked at him. He looked at me. Mohammed chomped away at his leaves.

As qat speeded the judge’s blood, his words crowded and leapfrogged from his mouth. My pen chased his runaway thoughts over the page in long, broken sentences. Acid juices trickled down my throat, and my head thickened. When the judge said things like: “We
work in three stages. The fourth stage involves two types of dialogue …” I just scribbled away.

The judge thought he could talk the terrorists out of it. That was the upshot. He met with militants and argued with them, trying to debunk their extremist ideas with theology. This was trendy in Saudi Arabia, too—a dry and Socratic strategy of undoing extremism. It always sounded bogus to me, this idea of coaxing bombers back to normalcy. I wondered if theological redemption was a circumspect way to protect criminals with the right family or tribal connections from going to jail. Not everybody was eligible to pay penance by chatting with religious scholars. Others languished in prison, were executed, got disappeared, and wound up in CIA custody. Who decided?

“So who, exactly, are you having these dialogues with?”

“People who have ideas based on the Salafi creed or people suspected of involvement with Al Qaeda or the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army and people suspected of involvement in the jihad movement and any other people who have some thoughts different than Islamic scholars,” all in a single breath.

One hundred and seven suspected Al Qaeda members had so far been reformed, he told me. He’d also reached out to 350 of Houthi’s followers, and brought 176 of those to “positive ends.” We were all ramped up and the air popped with exclamation points, statistics glinting like beads in my notes.

“All of them,” the judge said grandly, “undertake to denounce extremism, terror, and violence, to be good citizens and follow the constitution and maintain security and respect the rights of non-Muslims in Yemen and undertake not to harm foreign embassies in Yemen.”

I mentioned the Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, a group that had kidnapped foreigners and was linked to the bombing of the USS
Cole
.

“The Aden-Abyan Army is dissolved already,” the judge said hastily. “People who were involved are good citizens now and they never think of it at all.”

I blinked. He had just said he was holding dialogues with members of that group. The judge blustered forward in his monologue.

“There is no so-called jihad movement at all,” he announced grandly.
“Those people who were members of Al Qaeda and sympathizers of Al Qaeda. From December ’02 to now there is no terrorist threat.”

“No terrorist threat …” I muttered. “But—what happened in December ’02?”

“They formed the theological committee,” Mohammed whispered helpfully.

“Yemen suffered from terrorism more than any other country.” The judge jabbed a finger in time with the clatter of consonants. “I believe there is no threat from extremism. There might be people with extremist ideas but they pose no threat. We are on the right path now, to stability.”

“But you just said …” I shuffled unhappily through my notes. “You just
said
you’re meeting with members of those groups. How can you now say they don’t exist?”

“Eighty percent of the danger has been removed,” he said, and nodded slowly. He cleared his throat, looked at Mohammed, and said something like “Well …” We were being cordially invited to clear out.

“How can you possibly quantify that eighty percent?” I asked desperately. “What does it even mean?”

“Eighty percent,” he replied dreamily, smiling a close-lipped smile. “More or less.”

Empty statistic ringing in my ears and diffusing on the surface of qat-muddled thought, I stepped back into the dark, cold mountain night.

The truth is, precious few people know what the United States is doing in Yemen or Saudi Arabia or even Jordan. And by all signs, journalists are not among them. People in the embassies know, theoretically, at least about their own bit, but they are unlikely to share with a reporter unless there is some public relations benefit, which in turn renders the information suspect. There are people like Faris, who talk to reporters while spinning a protective gloss over the rest of the country; and people who know a lot but don’t talk to you. And there are people like the human rights lawyer—living on the margins, shuttling in and out of jail, relying on attention from abroad as a weak shield. I recently read
that he was beaten and gun-butted in a courtroom by soldiers and bodyguards.

You get a translator and people whisper, don’t trust him, he’s compromised, he works for the government. Everybody said that about everybody else; and although they didn’t usually say so, many of them believed that journalists were also spies. Somewhere behind all those walls and obfuscations, the war on terror was fought. The CIA flew a drone over the Yemeni countryside one day, shot a Hellfire missile down, and killed six people. One of them was a U.S. citizen. No safe harbor, as they say. Yemen was a ward stuffed with all of those disorders—the hidden war, the crazed tribesmen, the jihad, the debts owed to America, the secret operations. It was all there, sensed but not seen, palpable but intangible.

There was so much lying and hiding going on that you couldn’t believe much of anything unless you saw it yourself, and the things I saw never seemed to match what people said about them. My job would have been easier if I could have been more credulous. “I think maybe this is happening,” says one reporter to the other, who will likely reply, “It can’t be, because so-and-so told us X.” Nobody tells you how to proceed if so-and-so is lying to you, if X is false. Still, you have to file something. The newspaper bawls its big, inky hunger. If you think you know one tiny thing, if somebody has said something, at least it’s something to write about. So you write.