It is truly touching how the world works. On one side of the border, you have the United Arab Emirates. It is a land of glittering skyscrapers, influencers taking selfies on yachts, and shopping malls that have their own ski slopes. It is the place where the world goes to pretend everything is perfect, shiny, and expensive. It is the playground of the rich. But apparently, even the rich get bored. They need a hobby. And according to the BBC, that hobby seems to be running secret prisons in Yemen.

We love the word "secret," don't we? It adds such a nice flavor of mystery to what is actually just old-fashioned brutality. The BBC has gone and spoiled the fun by finding these sites. They looked at former UAE bases in Yemen and found exactly what you would expect to find in a war zone run by people with too much money and too few rules. They found places where people disappear. It is not really a secret if the mothers of the missing men are standing outside screaming for answers. It is only a secret if you choose to close your eyes, which is exactly what the international community prefers to do.

Imagine the scene. A mother waits by the phone. She hasn't heard from her son in seven months. Seven months. In our world, if the internet goes down for seven minutes, we have a panic attack. We feel isolated. Now imagine seven months of wondering if your child is alive or if he is being held in a gas tank. Yes, a gas tank. That is one of the details that came out. Detainees claim they were held in all sorts of creative horrors. It takes a special kind of mind to look at an industrial gas tank and think, "You know what? That would make a great bedroom for a prisoner."

This is the theater of the absurd at its finest. The UAE was in Yemen as part of a coalition to restore order. They were the "good guys," or so the press releases told us. They were there to fight rebels and terrorists. And how do you fight terror? Apparently, by terrifying everyone else. The report details abuse that would make a medieval dungeon master blush. Blindfolds, beatings, the works. It is the standard operating procedure for "liberators" everywhere. You come to save the village, and you end up turning the local gas station into a torture chamber.

Of course, now the UAE says they don't run these places anymore. They handed them over to the Yemeni coastguard or some other local group. This is the classic bureaucratic shuffle. It is the geopolitical version of "it wasn't me." They outsource the dirty work. They build the prison, set up the system, maybe train the guards, and then when the cameras show up, they point to the local guys and say, "Talk to them, we just work here." It is sophisticated gaslighting. It allows them to go back to hosting golf tournaments and art fairs while the people in Yemen are still rotting in the dark.

What makes this so tragically funny—in a way that makes you want to cry—is the silence from everyone else. The Western powers, the big democracies, they all sell weapons to these guys. They all do business in the shiny towers of Dubai. They know what is happening in Yemen. Yemen is the world’s punching bag. It is the place where powerful countries go to play war games. The human cost is just a line item in a budget somewhere. A "necessary expense" for stability. But what stability? The only stable thing in Yemen is the suffering. That is consistent. That never changes.

This story about a mother not hearing from her son for seven months is not unique. It is the story of the whole country. Yemen has been screaming for years, and the world has put it on mute. We treat the entire nation like a secret prison. We lock it away, throw away the key, and hope the noise doesn't disturb our brunch. The BBC report is a crack in the wall. It lets a little bit of light in. But will it change anything? Probably not.

The cynical truth is that we don't care enough. We prefer the lie. We prefer to believe that the shiny towers represent the Middle East, and not the rusty shipping containers used as cells. We want to believe that our allies are civilized, even when they act like barbarians. So, there will be a denial. There will be a "thorough investigation" that finds nothing. And the mothers will keep waiting. The actors change, the uniforms change, but the play remains exactly the same. It is a tragedy, written by incompetents and directed by sadists.