Human Rights Law

The Curious Case Against Dr. Aafia Siddiqui

By Alexa

--Najma Sadeque, Pakistan-based rights activist and senior journalist, referring to the treatment meted out to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui by U.S. authorities.

Dr. Aafia's life in recent years is a mystery inside a riddle, as are the lives of her three children, ages 7 months to 5 years at the time of her being shot and detained by the U.S. in 2003, imprisoned ever since and never charged.

There are multiple mistaken identities, missing persons, allegations without substance. These include a child who was returned to his aunt, Aafia's sister, whom neither the child nor the family recognized, answering to at least three names; the exact location of Aafia's detention (known as The Grey Lady of Bagram, Prisoner 650, the U.S. now denies that she was ever imprisoned at Bagram); the apparent disappearance of a Muslim blogger in Boston who wrote about Aafia and attended protests in advocacy of her.

What is this tangled web of lies and deceptions surrounding the woman known as "the daughter of Pakistan?"

 
Five years after she vanished from her parents' home in Karachi along with her three children, Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia  Siddiqui appeared in a New York court in August, accused of trying to kill U.S. officers in Afghanistan.

Accounts of her arrest and the shooting incident differ.

The Official Story is that Siddiqui, 36, was arrested outside the governor's office in Afghanistan's Ghazni province on July 17 after police searched her handbag and found documents on making explosives, excerpts from the book "Anarchist's Arsenal" and descriptions of New York City landmarks, federal prosecutors said in a statement.

The next day when U.S. soldiers and FBI agents went to question  the U.S.-trained neuroscientist, she attacked them, the (PDF) Justice Department said in a statement. She fired two shots using the rifle of one of the U.S.. army officers but nobody was hit. The officer then fired back at her, using his service pistol and at least one shot hit her, the Justice Department said.

Afghan police in Ghazni however, told a different story, according to a report filed by Reuters. Afghan police said officers searched Siddiqui after reports of her suspicious behaviour and found maps of Ghazni, including one of the governor's house, and arrested her along with a teenage boy.

U.S. troops requested the woman be handed over to them, but the police refused, a senior Ghazni police officer said.

U.S. soldiers then proceeded to disarm the Afghan police at which point Siddiqui approached the Americans complaining of mistreatment by the police. The U.S. troops, the officer said, "thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and and took her". The boy remained in police custody.

Whatever the circumstance, Siddiqui was then flown to New York where she appeared in a wheelchair, looking frail and, according to her lawyers, in urgent need of medical attention.

The case bears recounting, not just because Siddiqui is a MIT  educated mother of three, but because it has roused strong passions, especially in Pakistan.

Since the time of her disappearance in 2003, human rights groups have alleged Siddiqui had been taken into secret custody, one of thousands of Pakistanis who had disappeared in the U.S.-led war on al Qaeda and Taliban. They said they believed she was in Bagram, the U.S. air base in Afghanistan.

U.S. authorities strongly denied Siddiqui was in custody, and according to the New York Times,  military and intelligence officials believed her to be in Pakistan until her arrest in Afghanistan in July.

Protests have taken place in Karachi, Lahore and even outside the court in Manhattan where Siddiqui appeared. The anger is directed as much, if not more, at the Pakistani government and its  agencies who are accused of handing over Siddiqui to the United States as at Washington itself.

There are online petitions seeking Siddiqui's release and others warning this is only the tip of the iceberg and that there are many others at risk. Comments on blogs reflect anger, shame and helplessness to undo what many see as a terrible wrong done to her.

Count me in on that. Aafia went to MIT and Brandeis, married a Brigham and Women's physician, made her home in Boston, cared for her children, and raised money for charities. Aafia Siddiqui was a normal woman living a normal American life. Until the FBI called her a terrorist.

At a news conference in May, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III announced that the FBI was looking for seven people with suspected ties to Al Qaeda. MIT graduate and former Boston resident Aafia Siddiqui was the only woman on the list. After the photos of her appeared on television, the informant picked up the phone and dialed investigators at the Special Court for Sierra Leone, which is examining Africa's illegal diamond trade. The informant was convinced that the woman in the photographs was the woman who had come to Liberia.

Now imagine this: The woman in the photographs, Aafia Siddiqui, the same week, mid-June, 2001. She is a 29-year-old mother of two, consumed, like other Boston moms who volunteer or work outside the home, with the minutiae of everyday life. A deeply religious woman, she picks up Korans from a local mosque and distributes them to inmates in area prisons. She hosts play groups in her apartment on the 20th floor of the Back Bay Manor in Roxbury. She takes her sister Fowzia's child into her care while Fowzia finishes a fellowship in neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital. She does the grocery shopping and prepares meals for her children and husband, an anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women's. (Boston Magazine)

""I call her the Grey Lady of Bagram because she is almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her." --Moazzam Begg

Defense attorney Elaine Whitfield Sharp via Cage Prisoners:

"We do know she was at Bagram for a long time. It was a long time. According to my client she was there for years and she was held in American custody; her treatment was horrendous."

Siddiqui's claim is contrary to the heavily contested position of the US administration that she was detained in July by Afghan forces while attempting to bomb the compound of the governor of Ghazni. The US has previously denied the presence of female detainees in Bagram and that Aafia was ever held there, bar for medical treatment in July 2008.

Sharp also commented about Siddiqui's current condition and in particular the gunshot wound she has received. Not having been given proper medical treatment for the wound, there is a real concern that it will become infected as it is believed to be septic. She is extremely weak and had to be wheeled into her legal visit.

Aafia entered Brandeis University as a graduate student in cognitive neuroscience. Though media reports in the past year have erroneously given her such technical-sounding titles as microbiologist, geneticist, and neurologist, the truth is that Siddiqui's training didn't lend itself easily to the type of terrorist acts that haunt us in our worst nightmares.

"They started with the whole idea that Aafia was involved in biochemical warfare," says Sharp. "She wasn't taking brain cells and testing how they reacted to gases. But there's all this news in the media about the changing face of Al Qaeda and the neurobiology scare, and now we've got this MIT graduate with a Brandeis Ph.D. who's cooking up all these viruses."

What Siddiqui was actually cooking up at Brandeis was more mundane. Her graduate work was based on a simple concept: that people learn by imitation. To study this, she devised a computer program and used adult volunteers, who came to her office and watched various objects move randomly across the screen, then reproduced what they recalled. The point was to see how well they retained the information having seen it on the screen.

Paul DiZio, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Brandeis who was on Siddiqui's dissertation committee, laughs when asked if such work could be applied to Al Qaeda operations. "I can't see how it can be applied to anything," he says. "It's not very applied work. It didn't have a medical aspect to it. And, as a computer expert, she was competent. But you know, calling her a mastermind or something does not seem -- I never saw any evidence."

On September 3, Siddiqi, 36, was produced before a federal grand jury in New York, which indicted her for possession of handwritten notes referring to a 'mass casualty attack' at various prominent locations in the US, such as Empire State Building, Statue of Liberty, Wall Street and the Brooklyn Bridge.

However, activists and her family believe that she is being targeted. "An ordinary Pakistani [has been] wrongfully taken to a foreign country without established judicial processes," said Dr Fouzia Siddiqui, Aafia's elder sister. Even the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) has insisted that she was picked up by a Pakistani intelligence agency and handed over to the US authorities.

The picture that was released when she was brought to the court in New York showed a woman who seemed to have experienced years of torture - a broken and badly fixed nose, made up teeth, and crumbled lips. The HRCP described her as a person "almost as if on the deathbed". Gaunt, wounded, she was unable to even walk by herself. (Excerpt from Will Aafia Siddiqui Live To Tell Her Tale?)

The story narrated about this alleged episode is not plausible, and contradictions self-evident.

Yet Aafia has been suffering and in pain in US prison for more than three months now. There are fears that she is now being brainwashed in order to render her incapable of giving evidence against any atrocities that might have been committed against her.

The anomalies in the trial are quite open.

Basically, the victim has become the accused; allegations are not being addressed in proper order; and allegations against US authorities by human rights groups and concerned citizens are going unaddressed. Those who say that they hope to get justice from US legal system in this case are overlooking the fact that the trial is not being held to provide justice to Aafia. It is being held against her.

Actually, the allegations are not addressed in proper order. The case involves three allegations, not one. These need to be addressed in the order in which they appeared:

1. The FBI's declaration that it needed Dr. Aafia Siddiqui for interrogation (2003) Source: Cage Prisoners; Devoid Of The Rule of Law, PDF

2. Allegations raised by human rights organizations and Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf that Aafia Siddiqui was being illegally detained, raped and tortured by US authorities (with possible compliance of Pakistani authorities) for five years, and that her three minor children were in illegal detention. July 6, 2008 is the high water mark for this allegation.

3. Allegation raised by US authorities against Dr. Aafia Siddiqui that she tried to assassinate US Army personnel on July 18, 2008. This allegation was brought forth on August 4, 2008.

The first of these has not been legally pursued by authorities even after they admitted having custody of Aafia. The second allegation, which is against US authorities, has never been answered seriously except for a flat rebuttal in inappropriate and condescending tone (consider the US envoy's open letter of August 16).

Now the third allegation is being addressed in a court of law without addressing the second. This leads to great confusion. The victim has been given into the custody of the party accused of committing offenses against her, and mandate is given to them to further curtail her liberties as a "high security risk".

Let's understand that it's not as if US Government said that it would rather like to keep Aafia in a rehabilitation center in America for treatment of torments suffered by her during five-year-long illegal detention. The victim is now in custody of the party accused of committing the following atrocities against her.

Now the first step should have been to ensure that the party accused of committing these offenses didn't have any further access to her with malevolent intent. The opposite has happened. Aafia's transfer from military to civil authorities doesn't ensure that her abusers have lost influence.

Two children of the victim are still missing. If they are still alive then it is possible that they are being used as hostages to pressure her. Allegations of her illegal detention, rape, etc, and the abduction of her children, are going unaddressed. Can she get justice from the US legal system?

That question will arise only after a case is brought up to seek justice for her. The current trial has been registered against the victim and not against her abusers.

Full post as published by Never In Our Names on November 17, 2008 (boomark / email).