Every Man in This Village Is a Liar_ An Education in War - Megan K. Stack [76]
“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