U.S. Hospital of Horrors — Dr. Aafia's new home

by Yvonne Ridley

Tehran Times

When Dr. Aafia Siddiqui was sentenced to 86 years by New York judge Richard Berman it sent shock waves around the world. Many of her supporters felt that it was just one step down from the death penalty… sadly, this could be closer to the truth than they imagine.

For not only did the New York judge expose his vindictive pursuit of the defendant by imposing the unprecedented sentence he also personally intervened to make sure she would serve it in one of America’s most brutal institutions.

In short he probably HAS sentenced Dr. Aafia Siddiqui to death because if she remains in the innocuous sounding Federal Medical Facility in Carswell, Texas, like many others who have gone before her, she may not survive the experience.

Carswell is the only mental institution of its kind in the USA, and despite the fact that Judge Berman refused to accept Dr. Siddiqui was not mentally fit to stand trial he subjected her to a judicial farce in which she was found guilty of attempted murder of U.S. soldiers.

So if he refused to accept Dr. Siddiqui was unstable why would he then insist on sending her to Carswell which is known across the USA as the Hospital of Horrors?

Let me tell you how Carswell -- or CarsHELL which houses 1500 female prisoners, earned its reputation.

In the last 10 years…

· COUNTLESS young women -- more than 100 -- have died under “questionable circumstances” with families unable to obtain autopsy reports

· NUMEROUS cases of sex abuse, including sodomy and rape, were carried out by prison chaplain Vincent Bassie Inametti whose reign of terror lasted eight years until he was finally convicted in 2008

· RAMPANT sex abuse of prisoners was reported by prison doctor Roger Guthrie who was fired for whistle-blowing

· PRISON doctor was convicted of sexually abusing inmates while another doctor was allowed to leave without charge after being caught sexually abusing a woman patient

· GROSS medical negligence has been reported including lack of care for several cancer patients -- one went untreated for a year and died

· SERIAL sexual predator and prison guard Michael Miller was convicted of raping a detainee

· FORCED psychotropic medication on reluctant detainees

· INFESTATION of ants went unchecked even when one patient in a coma was covered by the biting creatures as was the corpse of another.

To quote one local newspaper, The Fort Worth Weekly, time served in Carswell “can be a death sentence for women prisoners”.

In a different report about Carswell earlier this year the same newspaper said: “It has a troubling history of medical misconduct and sexual abuse of prisoners. Inametti is the eighth man to be convicted of or fired for sexual abuse, including rape, of female prisoners at the facility since 1997. But women there say that sexual abuse is much more rampant than that; the eight cases only became known when women overcame their fears of retribution and reported their attackers.”

And renowned lawyer Elizabeth Fink said in a statement: “One of my clients was transferred to Carswell to receive chemotherapy. She did not receive it for one full year after the therapy was prescribed. She died of classic Kaposi’s Sarcoma, a cancer with a low mortality rate -- when treated.”

There are a string of court cases outstanding against the institution from those who have survived the Carswell experience and there are families of those who died in custody who are still fighting for justice, demanding to know the truth.

The catalogue of crimes against the female detainees reads like something from a third world country and such an institution would have certainly been closed down by now or overhauled if it existed in Europe.

In fact Dr. Siddiqui should be removed from the U.S. prison system altogether pending her repatriation.

All of this will, of course, make uncomfortable reading for Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi who promised Dr. Siddiqui’s family that wherever she was sent she would be treated with respect.

“I will make sure Aafia’s living conditions are humane and respecting Islamic ideology and she be provided full access to family and lawyers without strip searches,” he assured Dr. Siddiqui’s sister Dr. Fowzia Siddiqui recently.

Well if he really wants to make good his promise he should now move heaven and earth to get the Daughter of the Nation out of this vile hell-hole before she becomes another of Carswell’s grim statistics.

Once again the U.S. has shown its contempt towards the wishes of the Pakistan Government and its vindictive persecution of a woman who has been renditioned, raped, tortured and abused since March 2003 when she and her family were kidnapped in Karachi during a joint U.S.-Pakistani-led operation.

The move to repatriate Dr. Siddiqui must now take on a new sense of urgency… before it is too late.
Journalist Yvonne Ridley is also a patron of Cageprisoners, a London-based NGO concerned with human rights of those caught up in the War on Terror. Photo: Federal Medical Facility in Carswell, Texas,USA

The News (Pakistan) - Letters to the Editor

The News (Pakistan)

The mysterious way in which Maryam Siddiqui, the daughter of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, turned up at her relatives' home in Karachi raises some disturbing questions. If Dr Aafia Siddiqui was indeed captured by US authorities, then it is a mockery of the Pakistani security setup that the US intelligence agencies operate unhindered on Pakistani soil, pick up a citizen of Pakistan whenever they want and drop them off whenever and wherever they like. Are these foreign agencies accountable to anyone? How can the Pakistani security agencies not trace the captors of Maryam Siddiqui? Who is going to pay for the ordeal through which Maryam and her family went during all these years? On the other hand, if the arrest of Dr Aafia Siddiqui and her children was not the work of foreign agencies, is it correct to assume that Maryam Siddiqui has been a prisoner of her country's own security agencies? In either case, whether Dr Aafia Siddiqui's family suffered at the hands of the US or her own country, her case symbolises the horrific and inhumane nature of the war on terror which has brought death and destruction to millions of people in South Asia. The consensus verdict of the New York jury against Dr Aafia Siddiqui, declaring her guilty, shows that the disregard for human rights and justice is institutionally ingrained in western polity. Dr Aafia Siddiqui's case and the war on terror help us understand the disillusionment of the Muslim world from the west and its ideals. Moez Mobeen Islamabad ***** It is good that Dr Aafia Siddiqui's daughter, Maryam Siddiqui, is with her family now. I am pleased that the girl has joined her relatives at last. I hope that Interior Minister Rehman Malik will help recover the still missing son of Dr Aafia Siddiqui. Mr Rehman should pressurise American authorities and get Dr Alafia Siddiqui released along with all those Pakistanis who are detained illegally by the Americans. Mubashir Mahmood Karachi

Recovered girl Dr. Aafia's daughter

PressTV

Pakistan confirms that an 11-year old girl, who has been in US custody for seven years and let loose in Karachi by unknown people, is the daughter of Aafia Siddiqui.

Daily Times, quoted the country's Interior Minister, Rehman Malik, confirming the girl, Maryam Khan, as the daughter of Aafia Siddiqui.

A US citizen and MIT graduate, Aafia Siddiqui, disappeared on a trip to Pakistan. Six years later, it was known that she had been kept at the Bagram US Airbase, in Afghanistan.

Reports of rape and torture shows she has been kept under inhumane conditions at the base. She was later transferred to the US and was charged with attempted murder and links with al-Qaeda. She was given a sentence of 40 years.

This is despite of the fact that Aafia's finger prints were not found on the weapon that she had supposedly used. She was convicted for firing at FBI agents and US military personnel in a police station in Afghanistan's Ghazni.

Chairman of the Senate's Standing Committee on Interior, Senator Talha Mehmood, slammed the US for keeping the child in a military jail in a cold, dark room for seven years.

He noted that the act is in violation of human rights, and threatened to stop cooperating with Washington in the region, should Afia Siddiqui not be returned to Islamabad.

Fauzia Siddiqui, Aafia's sister, following a meeting with Pakistani interior minister, expressed hope that the country's Premier Yousuf Raza Gilani would press for Aafi release in his trip to the US.

Aafia's sentence to jail has triggered protests in Pakistan, as millions of her supporters asked for the immediate release and return of Aafia, calling it "a question of honor for Pakistan."

Robert Fisk: The mysterious case of the Grey Lady of Bagram

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

How does a neuroscientist and mother of three end up in jail as an al-Qa'ida agent?

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 Guantanamo 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?

'Long March' for Aafia's release from 10th

by Farehia Rehman

The Nation

ISLAMABAD – Exhibiting grave concerns over the alleged sluggishness of the PPP-led regime to get Dr Aafia Siddique released from illegal imprisonment of USA, civil society activists on Wednesday announced to launch “Long March” from 10th of March.

A series of events are in pipeline as a part of a “Long March” that would be launched from Faisalabad Bar Association. The announcement was made in a peaceful demonstration at Abpara Chowk organised by the Pakistan Professionals Forum and student community of the twin cities to condemn and convey shock and abhorrence against the unjust verdict in Dr Aafia Siddique’s case and to show solidarity with her and her family.

Dr Fauzia Siddqui, Dr Afia’ s sister was also present at the occasion along with the representatives of the Pakistan Professionals Forum, Defence of Human Rights (DHR) and the civil society activists. Peoples belonging to all walks of life including doctors, engineers, lawyers, academicians, students, and other professionals also massively participated in the demonstration and rejected, in unequivocal terms, the illegal detention and conviction of Dr Aafia Siddiqui by NY court. The demo was held during rain. Participants on the occasion vehemently condemned her detention and appealed for efforts to secure her immediate release.

They opined that Dr Afia Siddiqui is a citizen of Pakistan and she was illegally abducted by Pakistani intelligence agencies and handed over to US authorities. Pakistan has the legal authority and jurisdiction to hear her trial and decide her fate, if she has ever committed a crime. Handing her over to US authorities is a gross violation of the constitution of Pakistan and an insult to the judicial system in Pakistan and the nation as a whole.

They also said that the horrifying case of Aafia Siddiqui and her three children is a glaring example of the criminal and inhuman practices of US imperialism and its ally, the Pakistani government.

While addressing the gathering, Dr Fauzia Siddqui said that the aggrieved families of the missing persons under the leadership of Amna Janjua have been waiting for the recovery of their relatives and consider that the current situation is contrary to what the government and other people from ruling parties are announcing.

She said that the Kangaroo court of New York has held Dr Aafia Siddiqui guilty for a crime that she never committed despite the fact that no fingerprints of Dr Aafia were found on the gun; neither witnesses could testify their statements.

“Abduction, illegal imprisonment, torture and rape of Dr Aafia by US forces is insult of national integrity, dignity and sovereignty of 170 million Pakistani people,” she noted.

She maintained that government of Pakistan has not made sincere efforts to get Dr Aafia released from illegal imprisonment of USA during last two years.

She urged the leading political parties of Pakistan and their leaders, particularly, Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif to put their act together and make sincere efforts beyond making press statements for immediate repatriation of Dr Aafia to her family in Karachi, otherwise nation would not forgive them forever.

In her address Amna Masood Janjua, Chairperson Defence of Human Rights (DHR) and wife of one of the missing persons Masood Janjua said that they demand that government of Pakistan should immediately withdraw its cooperation with US in so-called war on terror and ban all transit supplies of US and NATO armed forces to Afghanistan from Pakistan.

“Dr Aafia is daughter of Pakistan and her return to Pakistan is very vital issue, and government must take immediate steps for safe recovery of all the missing persons including Dr Aafia,” she noted.

The Terror-Industrial Complex

by Chris Hedges

Truthdig

The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security comes not from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe.

The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, 37, who received an undergraduate degree from MIT and a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University, often defies belief. Siddiqui, who could spend 50 years in prison on seven charges when she is sentenced in May, was by her own account abducted in 2003 from her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with her three children—two of whom remain missing—and spirited to a secret U.S. prison where she was allegedly tortured and mistreated for five years. The American government has no comment, either about the alleged clandestine detention or the missing children.

Siddiqui was discovered in 2008 disoriented and apparently aggressive and hostile, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, with her oldest son. She allegedly was carrying plans to make explosives, lists of New York landmarks and notes referring to “mass-casualty attacks.” But despite these claims the government prosecutors chose not to charge her with terrorism or links to al-Qaida—the reason for her original appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list six years ago. Her supporters suggest that the papers she allegedly had in her possession when she was found in Afghanistan, rather than detail coherent plans for terrorist attacks, expose her severe mental deterioration, perhaps the result of years of imprisonment and abuse. This argument was bolstered by some of the pages of the documents shown briefly to the court, including a crude sketch of a gun that was described as a “match gun” that operates by lighting a match.

“Justice was not served,” Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family, told me. “The U.S. government made a decision to label this woman a terrorist, but instead of putting her on trial for the alleged terrorist activity she was put on trial for something else. They tried to convict her of that something else, not with evidence, but because she was a terrorist. She was selectively prosecuted for something that would allow them to only tell their side of the story.”

The government built its entire case instead around disputed events in the 300-square-foot room of the Ghazni police station. It insisted that on July 18, 2008, the diminutive Siddiqui, who had been arrested by local Afghan police the day before, seized an M4 assault rifle that was left unattended and fired at American military and FBI agents. None of the Americans were injured. Siddiqui, however, was gravely wounded, shot twice in the stomach.

No one, other than Siddiqui, has attempted to explain where she was for five years after she vanished in 2003. No one seems to be able to explain why a disoriented Pakistani woman and her son, an American citizen, neither of whom spoke Dari, were discovered by local residents wandering in a public square in Ghazni, where an eyewitness told Harpers Magazine the distraught Siddiqui “was attacking everyone who got close to her.” Had Siddiqui, after years of imprisonment and torture, perhaps been at the U.S. detention center in Bagram and then dumped with one of her three children in Ghazi? And where are the other two children, one of whom also is an American citizen?

Her arrest in Ghazi saw, according to the official complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer, two FBI agents and two military interpreters arrive to question Siddiqui at the police headquarters. The Americans and their interpreters were shown to a meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain. “None of the United States personnel were aware,” the complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.” The group sat down to talk and “the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.” Siddiqui allegedly reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain “slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, and then fell unconscious.

But in an article written by Petra Bartosiewicz in the November 2009 Harper’s Magazine, authorities in Afghanistan described a series of events at odds with the official version.

The governor of Ghazni province, Usman Usmani, told a local reporter who was hired by Bartosiewicz that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: The U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a “senior Ghazni police officer” suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui. The Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.”

Siddiqui told a delegation of Pakistani senators who went to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after her arrest that she never touched anyone’s gun, nor did she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted, “She is loose,” and then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness she heard someone else say, “We could lose our jobs.”

Siddiqui’s defense team pointed out that there was an absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4, all of which suggested it had not been fired. They played a video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July 18. They also highlighted inconsistencies in the testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at times gave conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were sitting or standing and how many shots were fired.

Siddiqui, who took the stand during the trial against the advice of her defense team, called the report that she had fired the unattended M4 assault rifle at the Americans “the biggest lie.” She said she had been trying to flee the police station because she feared being tortured. Siddiqui, whose mental stability often appeared to be in question during the trial, was ejected several times from the Manhattan courtroom for erratic behavior and outbursts.

“It is difficult to get a fair trial in this country if the government wants to accuse you of terrorism,” said Foster. “It is difficult to get a fair trial on any types of charges. The government is allowed to tell the jury you are a terrorist before you have to put on any evidence. The fear factor that has emerged since 9/11 has permeated into the U.S. court system in a profoundly disturbing way. It embraces the idea that we can compromise core principles, for example the presumption of innocence, based on perceived threats that may or may not come to light. We, as a society, have chosen to cave on fear.”

I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also wildly overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and political passivity, as well as pump billions of dollars into the hands of the military, private contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive client governments including that of Pakistan. The leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years, just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as emblematic of the entire war on terror.

Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The number of extremists who are planning to carry out terrorist attacks is minuscule, but there are vast departments and legions of ambitious intelligence and military officers who desperately need to strike a tangible blow against terrorism, real or imagined, to promote their careers as well as justify obscene expenditures and a flagrant abuse of power. All this will not make us safer. It will not protect us from terrorist strikes. The more we dispatch brutal forms of power to the Islamic world the more enraged Muslims and terrorists we propel into the ranks of those who oppose us. The same perverted logic saw the Argentine military, when I lived in Buenos Aires, “disappear” 30,000 of the nation’s citizens, the vast majority of whom were innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to root out terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I arrived in 1983, the death squads were killing between 800 and 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of money and invest your political capital in a ruthless war against subversion, once you empower a network of clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you fuel the very insecurity and violence you seek to contain.

I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see. These abuses, justified by the war on terror, have created a system of internal and external state terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic radicals.

Ignoring Torture Claims and Questionable Evidence, New York Jury Convicts Pakistani Scientist Aafia Siddiqui

Democracy Now!

JUAN GONZALEZ: We begin today with one of the most baffling cases in the so-called war on terror, the story of thirty-seven-year-old Aafia Siddiqui.

On Wednesday, a New York court convicted the American-educated Pakistani neuroscientist of attempted murder for shooting at US soldiers and FBI agents while detained in Afghanistan in 2008.

Back in 2003, Aafia Siddiqui was wanted by law enforcement and the FBI and suspected of links to al-Qaeda leadership. But the MIT-trained scientist had mysteriously disappeared along with her three children, two of whom are US citizens. She reappeared five years later in Afghanistan with her oldest son and was arrested on suspicion of carrying chemicals and notes referring to “mass-casualty attacks” in New York.

Aafia Siddiqui was not tried on terrorism charges or for her alleged ties to al-Qaeda. The case against her rested on events that took place the day after she was arrested in Afghanistan in July of 2008. The prosecution said she grabbed an unattended rifle and opened fire on a group of US soldiers and FBI agents who were questioning her. None of the Americans was injured, but Siddiqui was shot and wounded while in US custody.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, on Wednesday, the jury reached a unanimous verdict, finding Siddiqui guilty of attempted murder, armed assault, and using and carrying a firearm. She faces a maximum sentence of life in prison. Defense lawyers argued there was no physical evidence that Siddiqui had touched the rifle.

ELAINE SHARP: I disagree with the jury’s verdict. In my opinion, it is wrong. There was no forensic evidence, and the witness testimony was divergent, to say the least. This is not a just and right verdict. It is a just and right system, but the jury—juries do make mistakes. Juries do go wrong. And my opinion is that this was a verdict that was based on fear and not fact.

AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, human rights groups have long alleged that Siddiqui was forcibly disappeared by Pakistani authorities in 2003 and interrogated and tortured at the behest of the United States. In her testimony last week, Siddiqui claimed to have been held in a secret prison by the Americans.

For more on the case of Aafia Siddiqui, we’re joined here by two guests. Tina Foster is the executive director of the International Justice Network. She’s a spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family. Petra Bartosiewicz is an independent journalist who has been closely following this story. She wrote about Aafia Siddiqui in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine, the piece called “The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes Its Enemies Disappear.” She’s working on a book called The Best Terrorists We Could Find, an investigation of terrorism trials in the US since 9/11.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Tina, let’s begin with you. Your response to the verdict?

TINA FOSTER: Well, the family’s response obviously is one of great disappointment, but I can’t say a great deal of shock, because from the beginning of this trial, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui was portrayed as a terrorist, and instead of assuming the presumption of innocence, which most criminal defendants get when they come into a courtroom, Dr. Aafia had already been painted very much as a dangerous woman before she was even brought into the courtroom. And so, I think we saw during the course of the trial that she suffered the prejudice that was—that had already been laid as a foundation.

So, the family is going to obviously be calling for an appeal. We’re obviously most concerned about Aafia’s mental state, because during the trial, she clearly was not herself. She made a number of outbursts during the trial, and we think that is directly related to the trauma that she suffered while in secret prisons and while tortured for those five years while she was missing. In addition, she’s been in solitary confinement for a year and a half while in US custody. That has also contributed to her deteriorating mental state.

And probably perhaps most importantly, why my organization became involved in this case is the two children, the two youngest children of Dr. Aafia, who were three months old and four years old when they were captured, are still missing. And the International Justice Network believes that those children were also taken into detention at the same time that Aafia was, and we’re still looking for those two children.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the decision of the government, even though the alleged crime that she was on trial for happened in Afghanistan, to have the trial here in New York, what was the basis for that?

TINA FOSTER: Well, I mean, I think that this is a pattern that we’ve seen actually since 9/11 of individuals who should probably stay in the criminal justice systems of the places where they are detained being shifted around in sort of a shell game. I think Aafia Siddiqui was likely in a number of secret prisons in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, before she came to be in US custody.

When she came into US custody, the first that we had heard from the family, after five years of her disappearance, was that she had—she was at Bagram Hospital in US custody, and she had been shot several times. And the explanation that was given were the facts that were alleged in the shooting.

AMY GOODMAN: Petra Bartosiewicz, let’s go back to the beginning. You wrote this very interesting story in Harper’s Magazine about Aafia. Tell us how you got interested, and then tell us her story from the beginning, this MIT-trained neuroscientist. What happened to her?

PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ: Well, I first heard about the case in August 2008, when she was brought to the United States from Afghanistan. And as Tina was saying, the issue of why she was brought here, she was entitled to a consular visit in Afghanistan, which she didn’t receive.

And the jury was told that she was brought to the United States to face charges because she opened fire on US soldiers, and that was the justification. But what the jury didn’t hear is this huge back story in this case, which kind of gives it the all-important context, and I think the trial sort of happened in a vacuum where it was just about this shooting in a room. But what they were not told was that she’d been missing for five years and that when she went missing in 2003, she was a suspected al-Qaeda operative. And she was never charged with that in this case.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say she went missing, where was she?

PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ: Well, she went missing from Karachi, Pakistan. That’s most of the reports. She actually spent about eleven years in the United States. She was educated in the US. She came to the US from Pakistan, and she joined her brother in Houston. He lives in Houston now. And she studied at MIT and Brandeis. And two of her three children were born in the US. She was married in the US to a Pakistani man.

And she lived a normal life until just after 9/11, when there were some reports that brought mainly her husband, I think, at the time, under suspicion. And they were interviewed by the FBI, and nothing really came of it. She eventually returned to Pakistan. She divorced. And then, in 2003, she went missing. But right around the time she went missing, there were increasing reports that she was wanted for questioning. And then later she was named an al-Qaeda—suspected al-Qaeda operative. But for five years, no one heard anything about her.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, in your efforts to get to the back story, as you say, you traveled all over Pakistan. She comes from a very prominent family, you suggested in the article, and you interviewed several of the relatives. And generally the press accounts there assumed she was in CIA or US custody during all that time?

PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ: Yes, I think the main—the story that most people believe in Pakistan is that she was picked up, but by Pakistanis. I think the conventional wisdom is that the US intelligence community relies on the Pakistani intelligence community very heavily, and so the belief is that she would have been picked up by the Pakistanis. And my reporting suggested that, as well, and that she was either handed over to the CIA immediately or soon after or at some point.

Some people are held in what is called custodial—in a custodial situation, where the Pakistanis might have control over them physically, but the US has access to question them. There are numerous documented accounts of that. And the belief was, though, that she was picked up. Now, there are also reports that she was on the run for some period of time, but it does seem that she was held somewhere for some period of this time.

AMY GOODMAN: The title of your article, “The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes Its Enemies Disappear,” what do you mean by that?

PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ: Well, the war on terrorism is fought largely through intelligence gathering, not really evidence building as in a crime like a murder, for example, where you’re going back after the fact. Terrorism is fought mainly in terms of future: what is going to happen, who might do something, what might they do. And intelligence is sort of the fodder for these investigations.

But intelligence is primarily produced by detainees. And so, we sort of are in this position now where we are needing to produce more and more detainees, who then produce that intelligence. And because we now have all of these confirmed reports about the types of interrogations that are happening, we know that there’s a lot of false intelligence being generated. And that leads to other people being detained. And I think the main tool that investigators use these days is kind of associations, who knows whom, and that’s the primary connection that gets people on the radar. The question of what that relationship actually means, which is all-important, is less investigated.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Tina Foster, I’d like to ask you about the trial itself, though. I guess the most dramatic moment is when she gets on the stand and says that she was being tortured while in US custody. She went on the stand against the advice of her lawyers. She appeared to have a very contentious relationship with the lawyers, claiming that they didn’t represent her. Could you talk about that whole aspect?

TINA FOSTER: Sure, sure. You know, Aafia, when she was brought to the United States in July of 2008, August 2008, she was assigned lawyers, but there was a period of time when she did not have anyone assigned to her. The government of Pakistan stepped in and hired defense lawyers, who were considered a legal dream team at the time. But by the time that had happened, Dr. Aafia had already lost complete faith in the US justice system. She did not trust any court-appointed lawyers, any lawyers that were going to be assigned to her, and she insisted that she wanted to at least have access to a phone book so she could try to find her own lawyers. That was denied by the judge. The judge said, “Listen, there’s a lot of lawyers sitting right here. We’re ready to try this case, and I’m not going to give you more time to go find your own lawyer.” That, I think, set the stage for a very contentious relationship, where Aafia, you know, continually disavowed her lawyers, did not—was not allowed to maintain any sort of relationship with them, and, I think, ultimately was denied effective assistance of counsel as a result of that, not by any mistake the lawyers made, but that was the judge’s call at the time.

When she took the stand, against the advice of her attorneys, she clearly had a story she wanted to tell. And she had not been able to tell it during the trial. She did her best to stay, you know, within the judge’s parameters of what she was allowed to talk about, because, of course, he wouldn’t—though he allowed all of the evidence against her trying to portray her as a dangerous terrorist, he did not allow the defense to broach that area. So, she came across, as Petra said, you know, speaking in a vacuum, and the jury didn’t hear the back story. So she may have appeared a little bit irrational in their minds, because they hadn’t heard that the reason she didn’t know that the boy that was found with her was her son is because they had been separated five or six years ago, and she had not been allowed to see him. So, a lot of the things she said seemed shocking to the jury.

AMY GOODMAN: Tina, can you explain how Aafia resurfaced in Ghazni in 2008?

PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ: Well—

AMY GOODMAN: Petra.

PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ: She was found in Ghazni with a boy, who turned out to be her son, and she was suspected of being a suicide bomber. She was really just wandering around in the city of Ghazni. And she was said to have on her a slew of documents and some chemical substances, which I think some were just cosmetics. There were some chemicals also. But they were sort of bizarrely incriminating, almost you would write into a movie script. They had words like “mass-casualty attack” and “cells” and named landmarks in New York City, and there were pictures of guns, which, when we saw them in the courtroom, were sort of like something that a child would really draw. They were described as a match gun that could be lit with a single match, and really not the kind of thing that I would expect a seasoned al-Qaeda operative to have with her if she was wandering around.

She turned out not to be a suicide bomber. But she was arrested, supposedly with these documents, and she was taken to an Afghan—to a local police station. And she was—according to Afghan police who testified at the trial, she was beaten the night that she was arrested by numerous people. I think she was also caned. She was tied to a bed to restrain her. Later she was released from the bed, and she was in a room that was divided by a curtain. It was a very small room. She was behind this curtain. And that’s where she was when this shooting incident occurred.

A US team had been alerted to her presence. FBI officials were called in from another base in Afghanistan. They flew in the following morning to identify her and to interrogate her and also to take her with them. That was the goal. But they were told by the Afghans that they could not do that, that they could question her, but they would not be allowed to take her. And they were ushered into this room on the second floor of the police station, where she was behind that curtain, unbeknownst to them, they say. And Afghan officials were already there, some people from the Ministry of Interior and some soldiers from the police station. And that is when this shooting supposedly took place.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And then I think you also mentioned in your article that, again, another bizarre aspect of this very bizarre case is that she somehow—that there was a rifle that just happened to be on the floor near her, even though she was a suspected connected—

AMY GOODMAN: Lady al-Qaeda?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Lady al-Qaeda, and they just happened to leave a rifle that she managed to grab and then attempt to shoot some of the agents.

PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ: Well, this is the most disputed part of this case, which is what happened after those US soldiers and FBI agents entered that room. What is agreed upon is that they were all there. She, herself, testified that she moved towards the curtain to peek out to see who was there, and she intended to try to escape. She wanted to get out of there. That’s what she told the jury.

Now, what happened next is the big question. According to the testimony of the US team, which was the soldiers and the FBI agents, they say that a warrant officer, who brought his M-4 automatic rifle with him, set it down near the curtain and that she somehow reached past the curtain, grabbed the gun, and aimed it at them, and actually got two shots off. And there were differences in the eyewitness testimony. Some of the people said they didn’t see the shooting. Some said that they saw her shooting from one of the beds that was in the back of the room. Some said she was next to the bed. There were all sorts of different versions of how this happened. The room was quite small and quite crowded, so people had different vantage points.

But what’s interesting is that there was no forensic evidence whatsoever that she shot that gun. There were no fingerprints on the gun. There were no bullet holes in the walls. There were no casings on the floor. There was an abundance of evidence that she had been shot. They found the casings from the revolver that shot her. They found—she was obviously wounded, so that was very clear.

I think that clearly what happened in—to a certain degree, is that the people in that room were startled when they saw her. And what happened next—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me ask something about the coverage of the trial, Petra—the reporters, Pakistani reporters, not being allowed in. Can you explain who covered the trial and why some weren’t in?

PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ: Well, the—before the trial actually started, there was an enormous amount of attention on this case for years, and has been, in Pakistan and much of the Muslim world. And a lot of the Pakistani press came to New York City to cover the trial on a day-to-day basis. But the only credentials that were issued for the courtroom itself were for journalists who have an NYPD press pass, which is actually difficult to get, and it’s meant mainly for crime scene reporters. I don’t have that kind of pass, either. A lot of courthouse reporters don’t have that pass. But that meant that the press rows were reserved only for those people.

And there were about thirty journalists who were credentialed, but they were mainly, you know, the New York City dailies, television stations, radio stations. And most of those outlets don’t cover these kinds of trials from the beginning to the end. They’re there for the first day; they’re there for the last day. And in between, the press rows were very empty.

And the first day, there were only six spaces for public seating, so everybody else was put into an overflow courtroom where they watched the proceedings on a television set. But that meant that whenever exhibits were put on the overhead projector, we couldn’t see that. Some of the witnesses came down off the stand to testify in front of the jury to look at some actual drawings and sketches of the room. We couldn’t really even hear them when they testified on that.

So there was a limited amount of ability to get to the courtroom. The press was—I have to say, the Pakistani press was eventually let into the courtroom, because I think the judge realized that there were not many people covering the case inside the courtroom, but they never really received the actual credentials that would give them that right to be there every day.

AMY GOODMAN: What has changed in covering—in dealing with terror suspects, from Bush to Obama, Tina Foster?

TINA FOSTER: Surprisingly little, unfortunately, I think. You know, in terms of the challenges that are faced by this country in repairing its image internationally, I think that President Obama has done a much better job in terms of articulating the—you know, a more neutral, friendly, positive approach. However, for those of us like myself at the International Justice Network who have been working on secret prisoner cases, people detained at Bagram instead of Guantánamo, all of these issues are a repeat, unfortunately, of what we saw under the Bush administration. So I think that this trial, in particular, of Aafia Siddiqui is one that is going to be watched in Pakistan quite—it’s already of monumental significance in Pakistan.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And she faces now a possible life-in-prison sentence?

TINA FOSTER: Yeah, she faces a potential life sentence. The sentencing won’t happen for several months. But in the interim, you know, we see that the Pakistani media and community are extremely upset, and they think that this is a travesty of justice, because, of course, they have seen the six years of back story and have been following this from the beginning, and they view Dr. Aafia as a torture victim, as someone who symbolizes the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who’ve disappeared as part of the US-led war on terror.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will leave it there now, though we will continue to follow the case. Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network, spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family. And thank you very much to Petra Bartosiewicz, who is an independent journalist closely following Aafia Siddiqui’s case. We will link to her piece at Harper’s called “The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes Its Enemies Disappear.”

Aafia Siddiqui found guilty by American kangaroo court

The Independent

An American-trained Pakistani scientist has been found guilty of attempting to murder US agents while she was detained for questioning in Afghanistan.

After the jury in a federal court in Manhattan gave its verdict yesterday, Aafia Siddiqui, 37, raised her arm and shouted: "This is a verdict coming from Israel, not America."

She had been arrested by Afghan police in July 2008 on suspicion of carrying chemicals and notes referring to "mass-casualty attacks" in New York.

During the two-week trial, FBI agents and US soldiers testified that when they went to interrogate Siddiqui at an Afghan police station, she snatched up an unattended assault rifle and shot at them while yelling, "Death to Americans". She was wounded by return fire but recovered and was brought to the United States to face charges of attempted murder, assault and gun charges.

Rights groups say she spent five years in secret US jails. She faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

US frame-up of Aafia Siddiqui begins to unravel

by Ali Ismail

World Socialist Web Site

Pakistani victim of rendition and torture

Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui went on trial in a federal courtroom in New York City on January 19, charged with the attempted murder of US personnel in Afghanistan’s Ghazni Province in 2008. The case against Dr. Siddiqui, 37, is rapidly unraveling due to lack of evidence and discordant testimony from witnesses.

It is becoming increasingly evident that the charges amount to a frame-up that has been staged to cover up the fact that Siddiqui, along with her eldest son, had been held without charges in the US military’s notorious Bagram prison in Afghanistan between 2003 and 2008 where they were subjected to torture. Two of Dr. Siddiqui’s younger children are still missing.

According to the account given by US authorities, Aafia Siddiqui was taken into custody by Afghan security services in July of 2008 after they alleged having found a list of US targets for terrorist attacks as well as bomb-making instructions and assorted chemicals.

Despite these claims, Siddiqui is not charged with any terror-related offenses. Instead, she is indicted for allegedly having seized an automatic weapon and fired on her Afghan and American captors when a group of FBI agents and US Army officers arrived to collect her. The most serious charge against her is using a firearm in committing a felony, the gun in question being a US soldier’s rifle.

Siddiqui was shot twice in the stomach and barely survived after medics at Bagram air field had to make an incision from her breastbone to her bellybutton to remove the bullets. It was reported that part of her intestines had to be removed to save her life.

The accusations against Siddiqui strain credulity and have been fervently denied by her relatives, her defense attorneys, and human rights organizations, all of whom claim that she had been held in secret US detention facilities where she was physically and sexually abused ever since she disappeared off the streets of Karachi in the spring of 2003 with her three children, then seven, five, and six months old.

According to the German weekly, Der Spiegel, just a few days before she disappeared, Affia Siddiqui had contacted her former professor, Robert Sekuler, at Brandeis University in search of a job, complaining that there weren’t any job opportunities in Pakistan for a woman of her educational background.

Dr. Siddiqui is a Pakistani national who was educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brandeis University. In July of 2001, she and her husband at the time were scrutinized by the FBI for their alleged association with Islamic charities. Following the events of September 11, 2001 the couple returned to Pakistan at a time when hundreds of Pakistanis and other Muslims were rounded up for questioning across the US. The family resided in Karachi where Aafia Siddiqui was employed at Aga Khan University.

According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, Aafia Siddiqui and her children were kidnapped by Pakistani intelligence agents on their way to the airport in Karachi. Their whereabouts remained unknown until Aafia Siddiqui and her eldest son, Ahmed, were reported detained in Afghanistan in July of 2008, several years after their disappearance. While the Pakistani Interior Ministry had initially confirmed that the abduction had taken place, it later claimed to have been mistaken and stated that Siddiqui was not in Pakistani custody. This about-face was an attempt to conceal the complicity of Pakistani intelligence services in the US government’s rendition of Siddiqui to Afghanistan and her subsequent ordeal.

Aafia Siddiqui’s sister, Dr. Fauzia Siddiqui, had informed the press that she and her mother had journeyed to the US in 2003 to meet with FBI officials, who had claimed that Aafia Siddiqui would soon be released. In Pakistan, Siddiqui’s family was repeatedly harassed and received numerous death threats from sinister forces within the Pakistani ruling elite. The family was ordered not to make any public appeals in support of Aafia and her three children.

Between 2003 and 2008, when Siddiqui’s whereabouts were still unknown, the US claimed she was working on behalf of Al Qaeda. In May of 2004, she was listed by US officials as one of the seven “most wanted” Al Qaeda fugitives. The US has also spuriously claimed that she is married to Ammar al-Baluchi, who is reported to be the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the so-called “mastermind” behind the 9/11 attacks. The claim that Siddiqui was married to al-Baluchi was based solely on coerced statements made by Mohammed, who has been repeatedly tortured.

The US military and the FBI have consistently denied that Siddiqui had been in US custody prior to her arrest in 2008. In reality, Aafia Siddiqui spent the years between 2003 and 2008 at the detention facility at Bagram air base, where many referred to her as the “Grey Lady of Bagram.”

Around the same time as her staged arrest, the British journalist, Yvonne Ridley, had been bringing attention to an unknown female detainee in Bagram prison who was known as Prisoner No. 650. In his book, “Enemy Combatant,” Moazzam Begg recalled hearing the woman’s piercing screams as she was being tortured while he was imprisoned in the same facility. According to Ridley, in 2005 male prisoners at the facility were so disturbed by her screams and sobs that they staged a hunger strike that lasted for six days.

When she was arrested in 2008, her then 11 year-old son Ahmed, a US citizen, was by her side. The traumatized boy has since been repatriated to Pakistan, where he is now living with his aunt, Dr. Fawzia Siddiqui. According to his aunt, Pakistani authorities have forbidden Ahmed from speaking to the news media.

Siddiqui’s appearance has changed markedly since 2002, according to her lawyers. She has suffered a broken nose, is deathly pale, and extremely frail, weighing about 100 pounds. When she arrived in the US, she was suffering from acute trauma, according to her lawyers who were outraged that she did not immediately receive the urgent medical attention. Siddiqui had been suffering from agonizing pain from the wounds she had sustained in Afghanistan and was slumped over in her wheelchair when she arrived in court in August of 2008.

Her trial was delayed as her lawyers argued that she was mentally unfit to participate in her own defense. However, prosecutors eventually found mental health experts to allege that she was faking her condition to escape punishment. Judge Richard Berman ruled that she was mentally fit for trial.

The paucity of media attention given to the trial is noteworthy, particularly given that Siddiqui was listed as a top Al Qaeda suspect. The tabloid press in New York City, where the proceedings have received limited attention, press has taken her guilt for granted, cynically dubbing her “Lady Al Qaeda.” The trial is being closely watched in Pakistan, where Siddiqui’s ordeal has outraged many and has sparked protests around the country.

From its beginning, the trial has been marked by questionable irregularities, and the judge has gone out of his way to accommodate the prosecutors. Not a single Pakistani journalist was granted press credentials for the opening statements last Tuesday. Defense attorneys protested the robust security measures put in place during the trial, which obviously reinforces the notion that Siddiqui poses a security threat to the US.

In a clear violation of her rights, Judge Berman has repeatedly thrown Siddiqui out of the courtroom for what he called her “outbursts”. The “outbursts,” were Siddiqui’s anguished claims of innocence and protests that she was tortured.

“Since I’ll never get a chance to speak,” she had told the court. “If you were in a secret prison, or your children were tortured…Give me a little credit, this is not a list of targets of New York. I was never planning to bomb it. You’re lying.”

The trial has also been marked by contradictory testimony from prosecution witnesses, which has undermined the case against Siddiqui.

On the third day of the trial, Assistant US Attorney Jenna Dabbs displayed several photographs of the room where the prosecution claims the shooting occurred. However, Carlo Rosatti, an FBI firearms expert who investigated the case, acknowledged last Friday that he had found “no shell casings, no bullets, no bullet fragments, no evidence the gun [the soldier’s M-4 rifle] was fired.” The only shell casing from the scene was from a 9-milllimeter pistol with which Siddiqui was shot. On the fourth day of the trial, another FBI agent testified that the FBI never found Aafia Siddiqui’s fingerprints on the M-4 rifle.

The warrant officer who shot Siddiqui also took the stand, recounting the version of events laid out by the prosecution. He claimed that on the day he and his colleagues went to collect Siddiqui, she suddenly got a hold of his rifle and aimed it at US personnel, at which point he opened fire with his 9-millimeter pistol.

When Siddiqui yelled out, “I never shot it,” she was tossed out of the courtroom for the remainder of the day.

The unnamed warrant officer, who had hobbled to the stand using a cane, was also permitted to recount how he was wounded in a recent and totally unrelated roadside bombing in Afghanistan, shedding tears as he did so. While having absolutely no relevance to the trial, the soldier’s wounds were invoked as part of a brazen attempt by prosecutors to sway the jury. Judge Berman’s allowing the testimony demonstrates the rigged character of the trial.

Sensing that Siddiqui was indeed emotionally unstable, prosecutors moved to force her to testify in the hopes that she would incriminate herself. Defense attorneys argued that she wasn’t mentally fit to take the stand. Once again, Judge Berman sided with the prosecution.

Berman warned Aafia Siddiqui that she is not permitted to speak about events prior to her arrest in July of 2008. Nevertheless, on Thursday Siddiqui repeatedly told the jury that she was held in secret prisons by US authorities, according to the Associated Press of Pakistan. She told the jury how she was shot just after she peeked through a curtain in search of an escape route. She added that it would be ludicrous to believe that a soldier would leave his gun where an allegedly dangerous suspect could get a hold of it.

“It’s too crazy,” she said. “It’s just ridiculous. I didn’t do that.”

When asked by a US Attorney about the contents of her purse which allegedly contained chemicals, bomb-making instructions, and a list of US targets, Siddiqui said, “I can’t testify to that, the bag was not mine, so I didn’t necessarily go through everything.” Siddiqui’s lawyers have claimed the bag and its contents were planted evidence. Her attorney, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, said back in 2008 that Siddiqui had been carrying what amounted to “conveniently incriminating evidence.”

“Of course they found all this stuff on her. It was planted on her. She is the ultimate victim of the American dark side,” another one of her attorneys had told the Associated Press in 2008.

Siddiqui also told the jury that her children were constantly on her mind and that she was disoriented at the time of her arrest in 2008.

On Friday, the prosecution called Gary Woodworth of Braintree Rifle and Pistol Club in Massachusetts to testify. Woodworth claimed that Siddiqui had taken a 12-hour pistol course at some point in the early 1990s. The Associated Press of Pakistan reported that Woodworth was noticeably distressed when the defense team demanded to know how it was possible for him to recall a specific individual from two decades earlier, when he’d had hundreds of students. Woodworth admitted that he had no records or documentation to back up his assertions, insisting that he was good at remembering faces.

Also on Friday, FBI Special Agent Bruce Kamerman testified that Siddiqui grabbed the assault rifle in a fit of rage. However, he appeared to be flustered when one of Siddiqui’s attorneys produced his hand-written notes in which there was no mention of her grabbing the gun.

In spite of the obviously fabricated character of the prosecution’s case, there is no guarantee of an acquittal.

Even if she is found not guilty, the fate of Aafia’s Siddiqui’s other two children, Mariam and Suleman, remains unknown. Siddiqui recounts that, while she was held in solitary confinement for five years, she was endlessly forced to listen to recordings of her screaming, terrified children. Her baby, Suleman, she said, was taken away from her immediately, never to be seen again. She said her daughter Mariam was occasionally shown to her, but only as an obscure figure behind a sheet of opaque glass.

The horrifying case of Aafia Siddiqui and her three children is but one example of the criminal and inhuman practices of US imperialism and its ally, the Pakistani bourgeoisie. Hundreds if not thousands of Pakistanis have been kidnapped by Pakistani intelligence services and handed over to US personnel to be dispatched to Bagram, Guantanamo and other “black site” torture chambers around the globe. While the Pakistani government now claims to be doing everything in its power to bring Siddiqui back to Pakistan, its supposed efforts are little more than damage control.

Aafia's lawyers blowing holes in prosecution's case

The Nation

NEW YORK – The trial of Aafia Siddiqui has made progress over the past four days, with FBI experts confirming that the M-4 rifle the Pakistani neuroscientist allegedly used to shoot at US investigators in Afghanistan does not have her fingerprints, the casing of the two fired bullets were not found, nor their projectiles or fragments discovered from the wall of the room where the incident took place. In addition, Carlo Rosati, an FBI firearms expert said on Friday, the fourth day of the trial in a Manhattan federal court before it adjourned for the weekend, he wasn’t sure the rifle was ever fired at the crime scene. The three-member defence team retained by the Pakistan government to defend Ms Siddiqui also brought out contradictions in the testimonies given by government witness put on the stand since Tuesday, when the trial began.

For instance, a former Afghani interpreter hired by US Special Forces contradicted the version of the incident in Ghazni given by a US Army captain about the position of Ms Siddiqui while allegedly aiming the rifle. While interpreter Ahmad Gul told the court that the Pakistani neuroscientist was standing with the gun in her hand, Capt Robert Snyder had said that she was in kneeling position. But the prosecution continues to insist that Ms Siddiqui had fired the gun. In his testimony on Friday, Rosati, the firearms expert, said he had thoroughly examined the weapon, the curtain from a room of Ghazni police station where the shooting incident took place and the debris of its wall where two bullets reportedly hit, but found no evidence that gunshots leave behind.

Ms Siddiqui is charged with snatching a US warrant officer’s rifle in mid-2008 while she was detained for questioning in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province and firing it at FBI agents and military personnel. None of them were hit. Pointedly asked by Charles Swift, the lead defence lawyer, if he was certain the M-4 rifle was ever fired at the crime scene, he said he could not say that with absolute certainty. An FBI forensic expert has already confirmed he found no fingerprints of Ms Siddiqui on the M-4 rifle when the weapon was produced in the court Thursday. Rosati, the firearm expert, said there was no gunshot residue on the curtain behind which Ms Siddiqui was stated to be sitting, nor he found any projectiles or fragments from the part of the bullet-hit wall built with stones and hard mud.

Based on the texture and content of the debris, Rosati said a bullet fired from an M-4 rifle into that kind of wall might get shattered or fragmented. However, under cross examination by defence lawyer Swift, the FBI expert conceded that a key element of the bullet - a steel tip that penetrates hard surfaces and never fragments - should have remained intact. Rosati did confirm that the 9-mm pistol that the US Army chief warrant officer used to shoot Ms Siddiqui, along with its two recovered, cases recovered at the crime scene, were fired. Swift, one of three lawyers retained by the Pakistan government who previously worked for the US Navy in the area of criminal defence, retained his reputation as a sharp trial attorney. He has been quick in identifying inconsistencies in the witnesses’ testimonies.

Meanwhile, Ms Siddiqui was again escorted out of the courtroom after saying she could help bring peace to Afghanistan, but that her lawyers’ don’t let her testify. “If you follow the mercy of mankind...they want to take away my right to testify. I’ve asked for it,” Ms Siddiqui told spectators during a break in the case. Please, I know you’ll take me out,” she told US marshals as they motioned to move her to a holding cell outside the courtroom. “I am not an enemy. I didn’t shoot anyone. I can bring peace with Afghanistan and the Taliban in one day, God willing,” she said. “There is no use for revenge and forgiveness is necessary”. Before Friday’s session ended, Judge Richard Berman reminded jurors that Ms Siddiqui’s trial was limited to attempted murder, not on charges of terrorism or involvement in any chemical or biological project. A section of the American press has consistently been portraying her as a terrorist, with headlines like: “Lady al-Qaeda”.

He also said that the trial was proceeding according to the schedule, and expects testimonies to conclude by the end of next week after which the jurors would begin consultations. At that stage, Swift, the lead lawyer, told judge Berman that the extra security measures, about which he had protested on Thursday, were still in place on Friday. He asked him to order the withdrawal of the additional measures that included the production of personal identification by visitors to the trial. He said the tougher measures violated the right of his client to a free and open trial.
Judge Berman said he would discuss the issue with the building security management, but asked the defence lawyer to submit his complaint in writing. Swift said the security people were saying that orders for the additional measures, in fact, came from the judge Berman. The judge did not respond to that comment. The trial of Ms Siddiqui is taking place under heavier-than-usual security. On Wednesday, a metal detector was put in place outside the 21st-floor courtroom, in addition to the ones already on the ground floor. Shahid Comrade, general secretary of the Pakistan-USA Freedom Forum, also protested the tough security measures in a statement issued on Friday.