Relaxed Politics

(Guest post by Laura.)

Here are the basic facts. On April 30, 2003, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui left her mother’s home in Karachi, along with her three children, Maryam, Ahmad and Suleman, and vanished. At the time the Pakistan Urdu press reported that witnesses had seen Pakistani authorities take the four into custody; this was confirmed by spokesman for the Pakistan Interior Ministry and by anonymous U.S. officials. A 2004 article in Boston Magazine notes that officials from both countries shortly after denied the family had been detained and stated that it was “unlikely” she was in custody. In 2004, the FBI posted photographs of Siddiqui; she was described by no less than Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller as a facilitator for al Qaeda. Reports indicate that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad had given the FBI her name under torture. The FBI also claimed that Siddiqui had brokered a diamond trade in Liberia for Al Qaeda in 2001, a charge attorney Elaine Whitfield Sharp, hired by Siddiqui’s family, states she can disprove.

For at least two years human rights organizations, among them Amnesty International, have posited that she was in U.S. custody, detained at a black site. Questions have been raised that she might be Prisoner 650, a woman known to have been detained and tortured at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

On July 17 of this year, Dr. Siddiqui and a young boy were found in Ghazni province of Afghanistan, standing outside the governor’s compound. Witnesses disagree whether the twosome were detained by local police or by Afghanistan’s Security Agency. Reportedly, plans on how to build explosives, descriptions of U.S. landmarks, and glass containers of “chemical substances” were found in her purse.

Here’s where the plot sickens. According to the U.S. government, when American soldiers went to question Siddiqui at a prison in Ghazni, the ninety pound woman, held behind a curtain, sneaked away one of their M4 assualt rifles (which a solider had set on the floor beside him) and tried to shoot them. An interpreter pushed her gun aside, and an American shot her with his pistol. Afghan police told Reuters that the U.S. troops tried to disarm the police when they refused to release her to them, and that Siddiqui was shot when she approached the soldiers to complain about how she’d been treated by the police.

Siddiqui was transported to New York, and appeared in federal court August 5 on charges of attempted murder. No charges have been filed related to terrorist activities. Presently she is being held without bail. The fate of the boy detained with her (thought to be her eldest child, Ahmad) is unclear. Pakistan Foreign Office Spokesman Muhammad Sadiq says that the U.S. has detained her children; the Pakistan government has called upon the U.S. State Department for their release and repatriation.

Inside Pakistan, a motion has been filed to force the Pakistani government to disclose what it knows about this case and of Siddiqui’s whereabouts for the past five years. On Thursday, the Pakistan’s National Assembly unanimously voted to call upon the federal government to demand the U.S. return Siddiqui to her homeland.

Siddiqui graduated from MIT and obtained a doctorate in cognitive neuroscience from Brandeis (her research was in learning and visual memory). She lived for ten years in Boston, and was married to a fellow Pakistani who worked as an anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women’s hospital. The couple moved back to Pakistan twice; they were estranged at the time that Siddiqui and her children disappeared. People who knew her in Boston described her as kind, mild, and devoutly religious. A far cry from the rabid extremist depicted in the following piece of yellow journalism by ABC:

While U.S. officials and media echo chambers bleat about this latest triumph over terror, the nub of this story is ignored: where have Aafia Siddiqui and her children been for the last five years? Where are her children now? What does the U.S. government know?

posted on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 8:00 pm under Uncategorized.