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"FacebookPinterest\n\n The hotel manager staring at me from across the massive desk looks like an Arab Al Pacino, only with less hair. Jalal won't break his gaze and neither will I. We're locked in some kind of battle of wills about whether the man who stole all of my camera equipment, but left my exposed laptop, was a thief or an intelligence goon.\n\n After poring through security tapes (yes hotels in Libya have surveillance systems as well as internet connections) the men playing detective at the Tibesti Hotel have found footage of a guy with a key entering the room I'm sharing with an American videographer. He walks out almost immediately with everything that would have visual or audio files\u2014three cameras and an iPhone. He takes the elevator to the second floor and then goes the rest of the way by the stairs, tilting his head down at all the right security camera angles.\n\n Libya is one of the last remaining completely controlled police states where the walls, lampposts and cell networks have ears. The hotel we're staying in was a key nerve center for the regime until Benghazi fell to rebel control over a week ago. Pacino and his deputy are insisting the man was just looking to make a quick buck. Doubtful.\n\n People are quick to say that everything is different now, but it looks like newly liberated Libya hasn't fully unwired itself yet. In fact, in the three days I've been here it appears that nothing in Benghazi is really as it seems\u2014happy rebels with AK-47s grinning from one car may well be fat horny men aiming pistols at women on the street in another. The foundations of Muammar el-Qaddafi's rule don't just disappear overnight and we're caught in the middle of the first obvious battle between the remnants of the Great Leader and the rebels, in the first city to fall from his stranglehold.\n\n At first the theft, discovered by my roommate Rachel Anderson, who has been reporting on the web activist Ahmed Sanalla, doesn't cause much of a stir beyond the hotel staff.\n\n But by hour six, word has spread and Jalal, who obviously became the manager of the state hotel not solely for his management skills, is doing damage control, promising that they'll find the thief and the equipment or hand me the cash equivalent.\n\n As we're milling about the smoky lobby waiting for a word on the \"investigation,\" the hotel is suddenly stormed by a group of young guys with Kalishakovs. It turns out Ahmed made a call to rebel command\u2014no revolution wants bad press.\n\n What follows makes little sense. The rebel brigade charges the hotel and at the same time, out of nowhere, the thief wanders in, seemingly of his own volition, and is apprehended by the hotel's staff. He's taken into an office on the second floor for questioning. Then a lawyer in a green kaffiyeh and a nametag from the revolutionary committee shows up and says that Rachel and I will have to make a statement in the Rebel Courthouse later that night.\n\n After what couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes of interrogation the thief is taken out of the makeshift holding chamber and escorted down the stairs surrounded by a random assortment of men\u2014rebels, hotel staff, who knows\u2014it's unclear who's who because in a city with no government, there are also no uniforms. The only security precaution they've taken to restrain the thief is holding his hands in a gesture that looks more like a lovers' stroll than an arrest.\n\n \"We'll get everything back,\" the hotel staff and rebels keep promising to the point where I can't help but repeat myself in every language I know that: It's not about the stuff but about why our stuff in particular. Why are people entering only our room? Why are they leaving the MacBook Pro and making off with a $50 flip cam? Although everyone knows the answer, no one will say it out loud.\n\n At midnight my stuff is \"recovered,\" Rachel's is still missing. He's taken her iPhone and video camera. She's been using her gear to film Ahmed, the web activist, and his friends. I've yet to take a single photograph of Libya.\n\n \"He's a thief. He's made a confession,\" the assistant manager of the hotel tells me. \"He said he needed money to eat. Don't worry, he's in prison now.\"\n\n \"Then why did he leave my computer?\" I ask for the hundredth time. The employee and I are speaking Russian. He knows the language because, like many Libyan military or intelligence employees, he studied in the former Soviet Union. It's suddenly become incredibly important that someone, anyone from the establishment admit there is an establishment.\n\n I sign a statement saying that my stuff is back, while Rachel runs circles in the hotel lobby. \"Why would they return my non-Libyan stuff and keep my friend's?\" I ask one of the middle-aged men who returned my camera to me. Apparently he used to work at the hotel, but retired a few years ago. He's come back to provide extra security.\n\n \"We'll get hers back,\" he says. \"But why would a thief leave my computer?\" I hammer away, my own attempt at interrogation. \"I don't know. I don't know. I don't know,\" he says. \"Look, if it will make you feel better I'll ask someone to go to your room and steal your computer.\"\n\n There are no clear explanations in police states and after 42-years of Qaddafi no one seems capable of straight answers. \"Until a week ago, I couldn't talk,\" the former employee whispers quietly to me in Russian. \"The man who took your statement is KGB. He's good KGB, but he's still KGB. If I wanted to talk to you before this, I would have had to ask his permission.\" We're both slumped in our chairs at a small table in the lobby. I don't know what side he's on, but finally someone has openly admitted there's a state security web. It's a step.\n\n Meanwhile, the rebels, having removed the thief, are positioned at the hotel door, eyeing everyone who comes in and out. Rachel and Ahmed have run off to the Rebel Courthouse where the rebel's say they are holding her stuff.\n\n When they return at 2 a.m. Ahmed crumples into a chair near tears. The rebels told him that the guy who stole our equipment had been monitoring him. Ahmed is a dual citizen: Libyan and British. He only moved to his parent's country four years ago. If you were watching the news during the uprising in Benghazi you might have heard his British accent on the air, narrating the situation. He collected footage of the fighting and was trying to share it the international press over a sketchy internet connection during the revolt. He's recently started working on a web memorial documenting all of those killed in the fighting.\n\n \"This country is fucked,\" he keeps repeating. \"I was just trying to do something good.\"\n\n Tomorrow the rebels will give Ahmed a pistol and instruct him to carry it with him at all times. It's no longer safe for him on the streets of Benghazi; even after the uprising Qaddafi haunts the city. Before the sun comes up we move to a different hotel.\n\n Sarah A. Topol is a Cairo-based journalist. She has reported from Bahrain, Egypt, Israel and Palestine, Libya, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Foreign Policy, the New Republic, Newsweek, and Slate, among others"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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