Document:Protests On Aafia Siddiqui Day

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Today is the seventh anniversary of the day that Pakistani neuroscientist Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and her three young children were reportedly abducted in Karachi, leading to Aafia’s disappearance for over five years — when she was apparently held in secret prisons and subjected to appalling abuse — before she resurfaced in Afghanistan and supposedly attempted to shoot a number of US soldiers.

For this alleged crime, she was flown to the United States, put on trial, and found guilty, in a federal court in New York, on February 3, 2010, on “charges related to the attempted murder and assault of US nationals and US officers and employees in Afghanistan.”

Numerous commentators have denounced the trial as a sham, and today, protestors around the world will be calling for justice for Aafia Siddiqui. Further details can be found on the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition, including a campaign pack (PDF), which contains a detailed report on the background to the story, and contact details for letters/emails to Aafia, the US and Pakistani governments and the UN.

Amongst the many outstanding questions regarding the case of Aafia Siddiqui are the following:

• Was she indeed kidnapped with her three children in Karachi on March 28, 2003, and subsequently rendered to a secret prison, where she was raped and tortured for five years? Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was released from Guantánamo in February 2009, has stated that he saw Aafia Siddiqui in Bagram, and other former prisoners have spoken about “The Grey Lady of Bagram,” Prisoner 650, who they believed was Aafia.
• Where are her children?
• If Aafia Siddiqui was indeed held in secret US custody for over five years, was the story of the attempted shooting of the US soldiers in July 2008 a cynical set-up, designed to ensure that she could be transferred to the US and tried, convicted and imprisoned without the true story coming to light?

I urge anyone concerned with the stories of “ghost prisoners” detained in secret prisons in the “War on Terror” to study Aafia Siddiqui’s story closely. Yvonne Ridley has focused on her case for many years, and other sources include a detailed report in Harper’s Magazine by Petra Bartosiewicz last November, another in the Guardian by Declan Walsh, and a recent report by Robert Fisk in the Independent, which I reproduce below.

I confess that, although I have been aware of her case for many years, I have never found the time to investigate it fully, as it seemed to me that it was a research project that could take months, if not years. However, it has always troubled me that her case could be the most distressing of all the many disturbing stories of brutality, injustice and false confessions in the “War on Terror,” and the failure of anyone to account for the whereabouts of two of her children has always struck me as particularly despicable.

The mysterious case of the Grey Lady of Bagram By Robert Fisk, The Independent, March 19, 2010

Dr Shams Hassan Faruqi sits amid his rocks and geological records, shakes his bearded head and stares at me. “I strongly doubt if the children are alive,” he says. “Probably, they have expired.” He says this in a strange way, mournful but resigned, yet somehow he seems oddly unmoved. As a witness, supposedly, to the mysterious 2008 re-appearance of Aafia Siddiqui — the “most wanted woman in the world,” according to former US attorney general John Ashcroft — I guess this 73-year-old Pakistani geologist is used to the limelight. But the children, I ask him again. What happened to the children?

Dr Faruqi is Aafia Siddiqui’s uncle and he produces a photograph of his niece at the age of 13, picnicking in the Margalla hills above Islamabad, a smiling girl in a yellow shalwar khameez, half-leaning against a tree. She does not look like the stuff of which al-Qa’ida operatives are made. Yet she is now a semi-icon in Pakistan, a country which may well have been involved in her original kidnapping and which now oh-so-desperately wants her back from an American prison. Her children, weirdly, disconcertingly, have been forgotten.

Aafia Siddiqui’s story is now as famous in Pakistan as it is notorious in a New York City courtroom where her trial for trying to kill an American soldier in the Afghan city of Ghazni in 2008 — she was convicted this month and faces a minimum of 20 years in prison on just one of the charges against her — is regarded as a symbol of American injustice. “Shame on America,” posters scream in all of Pakistan’s major cities. She is known as the “grey lady of Bagram,” supposedly tortured for five years in America’s cruel Afghan prison. Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari has asked American envoy Richard Holbrooke to repatriate Siddiqui under the Pakistan-US prisoner exchange scheme, while the Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has dubbed her a “daughter of the nation.” Opposition leader Nawaz Sharif promises to demand her release. But none of them mention the children. Ahmed, Sulieman and Maryam are their names.

Ahmed was returned to Pakistan from Afghanistan in 2008, but Dr Faruqi tells me he doesn’t believe for a moment that it is Aafia Siddiqui’s son. “He came here to stay with me, but he said he didn’t know Aafia until he was taken to Ghazni. He said to me: ‘I was in the big earthquake in Afghanistan and my brothers and sisters were killed in their home while I was out fetching water — that’s what saved my life.’ He told me that after the earthquake, he was put in an orphanage in Kabul. He was shown a photograph of my niece Aafia and said he did not know this lady, that he had never seen her before. Then he was taken to Ghazni and told to sit next to this woman — my niece. The boy is intelligent. He is simple. He is honest.”

All such mysteries require a “story-so-far.” It goes like this. Aafia Siddiqui, a 38-year-old neuroscientist, an MIT alumna and Brandeis university PhD, disappeared after leaving her sister’s home for Karachi airport in 2003, taking Ahmed, Sulieman and Maryam with her. The Americans say she was a leading al-Qa’ida operative. So does her ex-husband. She had re-married Ammar al-Baluchi, currently in Guantánamo Bay, a cousin of Ramzi Yousef who was convicted for the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing. Not, you might, say, a healthy curriculum vitae in the West’s obsessive “war on terror.” In 2004, the UN identified her as an al-Qa’ida operative.

But released inmates from the notorious American prison at Bagram near Kabul — where torture is commonplace and at least three prisoners have been murdered — have stated that there was a woman held there, a woman whose nightly screams prompted them to go on hunger strike. She was dubbed the “grey lady of Bagram.” At her New York trial, Siddiqui demanded that Jewish members of the jury be dismissed, she fired her own defence lawyers who said she had become unbalanced after torture; Siddiqui blurted out that she had been tortured in secret prisons before her arrest. “If you were in a secret prison … where children were murdered…” she said.

And so to the town of Ghazni, south of Kabul. It was here that Afghan police stopped her in 2008, carrying a handbag which supposedly contained details of chemical weapons and radiological agents, notes on mass casualty attacks on US targets and maps of Ghazni. American soldiers and FBI agents were summoned to question her and arrived in Ghazni without realising that Siddiqui was in the same room, sitting behind a curtain.

According to their evidence, she managed to take one of their M-4 assault rifles and opened fire with the words, “Get the fuck of here. May the blood of [unintelligible] be on your [head or hands].” She missed but was cut down by two bullets from a 9mm pistol fired by one of the soldiers. Hence the charges. Hence the conviction.

She wasn’t helped by an alleged statement by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the man who supposedly planned 9/11 and who is the uncle of her second husband, Ammar al-Baluchi — who claimed that Aafia Siddiqui was a senior al-Qa’ida agent. But then, he’d just been waterboarded 183 times in a month — which hardly makes his evidence, to use a phrase, water-tight.

The questions are obvious. What on earth was a Pakistani American with a Brandeis degree doing in Ghazni with a handbag containing American targets? And why, if her family was so fearful for her, didn’t they report her missing in 2003, go to the press and tell the story of the children? Ahmed — son of Siddiqui or Afghan orphan, depending on your point of view — is now staying with Siddiqui’s sister, Fauzia, in Karachi; but she refuses to let him talk to journalists. The Americans have shown no interest in him — even less in the other two, younger children. Why not?

It’s odd, to say the least, that Dr Faruqi also maintains that in 2008 — before the Ghazni incident — Aafia Siddiqui turned up at his home in the suburbs of Islamabad. “She was wearing a burqa and got out of the car, just outside here,” he says, pointing to the tree-lined street outside his office window. “I only caught sight of her once, and I said ‘You have changed your nose.’ But it was her. We talked about the past, her memories, it was her voice. She said the ISI (the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence) had let her come here. She wanted to get away, to go back to Afghanistan where she said the Taliban would protect her. She said that since her arrest, she knew nothing of her children. Someone told her they had been sent to Australia.”

More questions. If Siddiqui was a “ghost prisoner” in Afghanistan, how come she turned up at Dr Faruqi’s home in Islamabad? Why would she wear an Afghan “burqa” in the cosmopolitan capital of her own country? Why did she not talk more about her children? Why could she not show her face to her own uncle? Did she really come to Islamabad?

Fauzia Siddiqui is now touring Pakistan to publicise her sister’s “unfair” trial, her torture at the hands of Americans. Most of the Pakistan press have taken up her story with little critical attention to the allegations against her. She has become a proto-martyr, a martyr-in-being; if her story is comprehensible, it requires a willing suspension of disbelief. But America’s constant protestations of ignorance about her whereabouts before 2008 have an unhappy ring about them.

And the children? Rarely written about in Pakistan, they, too, in a sense, were “disappeared” from the story — until the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, paid an uneasy visit to Pakistan this week and, according to Fauzia, told the Interior minister, Rehman Malik, that “the children of Aafia Siddiqui will be sent home soon.” Was Karzai referring to the other two children? Or to all three, including the “real” Ahmed? And if Aafia’s two/three children are in Afghanistan, where have they been kept? In an orphanage? In a prison? And who kept them? The Afghans? The Americans?

Seven Days for Seven Years

One month ago, I addressed the disturbing case of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in an article marking “Aafia Siddiqui Day,” in which I ran through what I regarded as some of the particularly pertinent questions to ask regarding her disappearance for five years, the whereabouts of her three children (who disappeared with her in March 2003, when she was reportedly kidnapped in Karachi), and the alleged incident with US soldiers in Afghanistan in 2008 that led to her “rendition” to the US for a trial that ended with her conviction in February this year.

The case of Aafia Siddiqui is one of the murkiest in the whole of the “War on Terror,” as Declan Walsh explained in the Guardian after Dr. Siddiqui’s conviction. Walsh wrote:

Hard facts have been elusive in one of the most intriguing and murky cases to emerge from the Bush administration-era “war on terror.” It started in March 2003 when Siddiqui and her three children mysteriously disappeared from Karachi, probably picked up by Pakistani intelligence. What happened next is hotly contested. Siddiqui’s supporters, led by the British campaigner Yvonne Ridley, insist she was sent to Bagram airfield north of Kabul, where she was detained and tortured by US forces. Sceptics say she was probably on the run in Pakistan, associating with Islamist extremists. In 2004 the FBI named Siddiqui as one of seven senior al-Qaeda figures plotting to attack America, which earned her the nickname “Lady al-Qaeda” in the US media.

As Walsh also noted, however, “few of those events were examined in the trial,” which focused on her supposed capture in Afghanistan in July 2008, when she “dramatically resurfaced” and tried to shoot a US soldier, and which led to her conviction, even though the prosecution “could produce little forensic evidence to support its case, with experts unable to produce incriminating bullet cases or fingerprints on the weapon Siddiqui allegedly fired.” As Walsh also noted, “the jury appeared to have been swayed by statements from at least seven witnesses, including an Afghan translator and several US soldiers,” and “may also have been swayed by Siddiqui’s erratic behaviour.” After the verdict was announced, Dr. Siddiqui’s lawyer, Elaine Sharp, claimed that the case had been decided on “fear not fact.”

On Saturday May 1, the Justice for Aafia Coalition is launching a week-long vigil for Dr. Siddiqui outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square, London. The vigil, entitled, “Seven Days for Seven Years,” was planned to coincide with her sentencing, although this has now been postponed until July 21.

However, it is clearly an appropriate time to keep her story in the news, because, just a week after the seventh anniversary of her disappearance, one of her children resurfaced, apparently after seven years in US custody in Afghanistan.

According to reports summarized by Mary on Firedoglake’s Empty Wheel blog, “a girl approximately 12 years old, who spoke only English and Persian and claimed her name was ‘Fatima,’ was dropped off in front of the home of Siddiqui’s sister. Some stories indicate an American named ‘John’ may have been with her.” In addition, the Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported that a senior policeman described how the girl was “wearing a collar ‘bearing the address of the house in case she wandered off.’”

A week later, “Fatima” was apparently identified, through DNA testing, as Dr. Siddiqui’s daughter Mariam, and an article on the Justice for Aafia Coalition’s website noted that she “claim[ed] she was kept in a ‘cold, dark room’ for seven years,” allegedly in the US prison at Bagram airbase.

With the re-emergence of Mariam, two of Aafia’s three children are now reportedly accounted for. As the article above also noted, in late August 2008, Michael G. Garcia, the attorney general of the southern region of New York, “confirmed in a letter to Siddiqui’s sister, Dr. Fowzia Siddiqui, that her son, Ahmed, had been in the custody of the FBI since 2003 and that he was currently in the custody of the Karzai government in Afghanistan,” even though the US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, had previously claimed that Washington “had no information regarding the children.” The article added that Ahmed was finally released to the custody of Siddiqui’s family in Pakistan in September 2009, and later “gave a statement to police in Lahore that he had been held in a juvenile prison in Afghanistan for years.”

However, as has also been reported (by Robert Fisk, amongst others), doubts have been expressed as to whether the boy identified as Ahmed is really Aafia’s eldest child, and, of course, the whereabouts of Suleiman — a baby at the time of his capture — are still unknown, although it may be, as has been hinted at over the years, that he was killed during the initial kidnapping in April 2003.

While the fate of Suleiman must remain the number one priority for those seeking the truth about Dr. Siddiqui’s case, it is also imperative that pressure is exerted on the US and Afghan governments to explain whether there is any truth to Mariam’s claim that she was held for seven years in Bagram, where her mother was also reportedly held, and what the story is regarding the “children’s prison” where Ahmed was detained, which, according to some rumors circulating, also held — or still holds — other children of “terror suspects” seized in the “War on Terror.”

If this story concerns you, and you are in London, or within reach of the capital, please consider attending the vigil. Email the Justice for Aafia Coalition if you would like to register for the vigil, and please also note that speakers will address the vigil at 6.30 pm on Wednesday May 5, including Bruce Kent and, via phone link, Amina Masood Janjua, the wife of Pakistani “ghost prisoner” Masood Janjua, and the Chair of Defence of Human Rights Pakistan, which campaigns for justice for the thousands of Pakistani “ghost prisoner” who have disappeared in their home country. For further information, please visit the Justice for Aafia Coalition’s website.

See Also

• Aafia Siddiqui- WikiSpooks main Aafia Siddiqui page

External Links

• Justice for Aafia Coalition web site