Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [74]
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