A peaceful campaign was held throughout Pakistan earlier this month (2 December) demanding the United States Government to release brilliant US-educated Pakistani scientist, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, languishing in an American jail.
Interestingly, former US Congressperson Cynthia McKinney and the Co-Director of the International Action Centre, Sara Flounders, were in Karachi, to support efforts to free and repatriate Dr. Siddiqui, a cognitive neuroscientist. The two received an overwhelmingly warm welcome, with hundreds of Siddiqui’s supporters gathering at the airport in the wee hours of the morning, with flowers, signs and banners, chanting ‘Free Aafia!’ and ‘Welcome!’
Who is Dr. Aafia Siddiqui? What is her crime? A Pakistani national, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui was born in Karachi on 2 March 1972, to a family of academics. Her father Muhammad Salay Siddiqui, now deceased, was a British-trained neurosurgeon and her mother, Ismet, an Islamic teacher, social worker and charity volunteer, who is now retired. She was also prominent in political and religious circles and was at one time a member of Pakistan's Parliament.
Following her early education in Zambia and primary and secondary schooling in Karachi, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui moved to Houston, Texas, on a student visa in 1990 joining her brother. She attended the University of Houston for three semesters, and then transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, after being awarded a full scholarship.
In 1992, as a sophomore, Siddiqui received a Carroll L. Wilson Award for her research proposal ‘Islamization in Pakistan and its Effects on Women’. While she initially had a triple major in biology, anthropology and archeology at MIT, she graduated in 1995 with a BS in biology.
She eventually settled in Massachusetts. In 2002, she left US for Pakistan where her misery began.
Her first husband’s uncle was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged chief planner of the September 11 attacks for which number of reports now blame Israeli spy agent Mossad. However, Khalid Sheikh was arrested in March 2003 in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence - ISI. According to reports, it is believed Khalid Mohammed, who was tortured by waterboarding 183 times, mentioned Siddiqui’s name during his interrogation-torture. He has later claimed that he gave names of innocent people during torture. Siddiqui’s lawyers believe her name was one of these.
Her three children On 30 March 2003, Siddiqui, together with her three children, six-year old Ahmed, four-year old Mariam and six-month old Suleiman, went to Karachi Airport to board a morning flight to Islamabad to visit her uncle. However they never made it. They simply disappeared.
Her whereabouts were unknown for more than five years until she reappeared in Afghanistan in 2008, under detention. Siddiqui claimed she was kidnapped by US and Pakistani intelligence. One of her sons was killed during her arrest.
Her son Ahmed described that his mother was driving a vehicle, taking the family from Karachi to Islamabad, when it was overtaken by several vehicles, and he and his mother were taken into custody. He described the bloody body of his baby brother being left on the side of the road. He said he had been too afraid to ask his interrogators who they were, but that they included both Pakistanis and Americans. He described beatings when he was in US custody. Eventually, he said, he was sent to a conventional children's prison in Pakistan. The question is what is his crime?
Siddiqui later said she was kidnapped that day, on her way to the airport. Her abductors had taken away Ahmed, Mariam and the baby. The last thing she remembers, she said, was receiving an injection in her arm. She said that when she regained consciousness she was in a prison cell, which she now believes was on a military base in Afghanistan, because she heard aircraft taking off and landing. She claimed she was held in solitary confinement for more than five years and that it was always the same Americans who interrogated her, without masks or uniforms. For days, she said, they would play tape recordings of her children's terrified screams, and she claimed she was forced to write hundreds of pages about the construction of dirty bombs and attacks using viruses.
Many of Siddiqui’s supporters, including some international human rights organizations, have claimed she is not an extremist and that she and her young children were illegally detained, interrogated and tortured by Pakistani intelligence, US authorities or both during her five-year disappearance. The US and Pakistan Governments have denied all such claims.
In a 2010 audio-recorded testimony, the Sindh Province Police Superintendent had, in the words of Stephen Lendman, confirmed his personal involvement in arresting and abducting Siddiqui and her three small children in March 2003. He had said that Karachi authorities were involved, participating with Pakistani intelligence (ISI), CIA and FBI agents.
In an article in ‘Pro Pakistan’ M. Junaid Khan stated as follows: “The Americans kept her under rigorous detention in the Bagram jail (Afghan equivalent of Guantanamo Prison) and were not accepting her presence until the story was shared by ex-inmates of the jail to the media. She was constantly tortured for five years and was sexually and physically abused each and every day for five consecutive years, while the Americans put their best resources at work to find a single flaw in her past. Ironically, they failed to find a single wrong in her past and hence Americans were in a fix how to get rid of her.
“The real problem started after the press conference in Pakistan by British journalist Yvonne
Ridley, where she shared the story of Prisoner 650, the gray ghost lady of Bagram Prison. Meanwhile, the Western media left no stone unturned to label her the big catch of Al Qaeda in the hands of the Americans, while they themselves couldn’t prove a single instance of her involvement in terrorist activities in their five years of non-stop search for something (anything) to implicate her and save their face.
“After Yvonne Ridley’s press conference, it became evident that Dr. Aafia Siddiqui was the unfortunate soul to bear the brunt of the worst kind of treatment in the modern history of the world.
Prisoner 650 “The issue of Prisoner 650 became public and every media house in the world started giving it coverage and soon protesters came out on the roads in several Pakistani cities and in few Western countries for her release. The American intelligence agency, who failed to find any evidence against Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, however, was quick to stage a drama, which speaks volumes about their thinking patterns.”
Here is how Dr. Aafia emerged again from the Bagram Prison in front of the World.
The US has denied and ignored their involvement in Siddiqui’s kidnapping and imprisonment. However, on 23 January 2012, Khurshid Kasuri, former Foreign Minister of Pakistan under General Musharraf, admitted handing over Dr. Siddiqui to the US and expressed his regret. Pakistani ruling elite killing and selling their own people to please their American masters is not something new as General Musharraf had done in the aftermath of the 9/11.
Siddiqui’s American interrogators said that at the Bagram Prison where she was detained, she had grabbed an unattended rifle from behind a curtain and began shooting at them.
Siddiqui denied touching a gun, shouting or threatening anyone. She said she had stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain, and that after one of the startled soldiers shouted, "She is loose", she was shot. On regaining consciousness, she said someone said, "We could lose our jobs." Later Siddiqui was taken by helicopter in critical condition to the hospital where she underwent emergency surgery without complication. She was hospitalized at the Craig Theatre Joint Hospital, and recovered over the next two weeks. Once she was in a stable condition, Afghan President Hamid Karzai allowed the Americans to transport her to the US for trial.
After 18 months of detention in the US, Siddiqui was indicted on 3 September 2008, on two counts of attempted murder of US nationals, officers, and employees, assault with a deadly weapon, carrying and using a firearm, and three counts of assault on US officers and employees.
Her trial in New York City in 2010 was confined to dealing only with what happened in a matter of five minutes in a room in Afghanistan. Although the only person injured in the supposed attack was Siddiqui herself – she was shot in the stomach – the Court sentenced her to 86 years in prison and prohibited any discussion of her original kidnapping and years of imprisonment.
Not charged with terrorism Dr. Aafia Siddiqui was not charged with terrorism, nor was she ever charged with injuring or harming anyone anywhere. She is a victim of terrible life-threatening injuries.
Explaining why the US may have chosen to charge her as they did, rather than for her alleged terrorism, Bruce Hoffman, Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University, said the decision turned what might have been a potentially complex terrorism matter into a more straightforward case.
During the trial, Siddiqui tried to fire her lawyers due to their Jewish background (she once wrote to the Court that Jews are ‘cruel, ungrateful, back-stabbing’). In addition, she said her case had been orchestrated by unspecified ‘Jews’ and demanded that no person of Jewish descent be allowed to sit on the panel of jurors.
On 3 February 2010, she was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder, armed assault, using and carrying a firearm, and three counts of assault on US officers and employees. After jurors found Siddqui guilty, she exclaimed: "This is a verdict coming from Israel, not America. That’s where the anger belongs."
Siddiqui was sentenced to 86 years in prison by the Federal Judge Berman in Manhattan on 23 September 2010, following a one-hour hearing in which she testified. A New York Times reporter wrote that at times during the hearing Judge Berman seemed to be speaking to an audience beyond the courtroom in an apparent attempt to address widespread speculation about Siddiqui and her case.
Amnesty International monitored the trial for fairness. Four British Parliamentarians called the trial a grave miscarriage of justice that violated the Sixth Amendment to the US Constitution as well as the US’ obligations as a member of the United Nations, and demanded Siddiqui's release. In a letter to Barack Obama, they stated that there was a lack of scientific and forensic evidence tying Siddiqui to the weapon she allegedly fired.
In Pakistan Siddiqui was characterized as a symbol of victimization by the United States. Thousands of students, political and social activists protested in Pakistan. Some shouted anti-American slogans, while burning the American flags and effigies of President Barack Obama in the streets. Her sister has spoken frequently and passionately on her behalf at rallies.
Former Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani described Siddiqui as a ‘daughter of the nation’, and the Pakistani Senate passed a resolution demanding that the government take effective steps including diplomatic measures to secure her immediate release.
Shireen Mazari, Editor of the Pakistani newspaper The Nation, wrote that the verdict "did not really surprise anyone familiar with the vindictive mindset of the US public post-9/11". Foreign Policy reported that rumours about her alleged sexual abuse by captors, fuelled by constant stories in the Pakistani press, had made her a folk heroine, and that she had "become part of the legend that surrounds her, so much so that they are repeated as established facts by her supporters, who have helped build her iconic status".
Jessica Eve Stern, a terrorism specialist and lecturer at Harvard Law School, observed: "Whatever the truth is, this case is of great political importance because of how people in Pakistan view her. Dr. Siddiqui holds a place in the hearts of people of conscience internationally irrespective of their faith, nationality or location. There is immense international outrage about the conditions of Siddiqui’s imprisonment, which represents the US policy of secret rendition and the many disappeared and missing in Pakistan.
“The Muslim world embraced Siddiqui as daughter of the Ummah when she forgave her torturers and the tyrant judge. People around the world adopted her and demonstrated against her unjust incarceration. She has become a
symbol of humanity in the midst of a war based on fear, hatred, discrimination, injustice, torture, rendition and all that is evil.”
