Has Justice Been Served in Afia Siddiqui's Conviction?

A New York jury has convicted Dr. Aafia Siddiqui of shooting at American soldiers and FBI agents in Afghanistan during her arrest in 2008. The judge, the jury and the entire proceedings focused narrowly on shooting charges, and there was no discussion of how the accused ended up in Afghanistan. The trial has, in fact, raised more questions than it has answered.



The biggest question that remains unanswered is where was Aafia Siddiqui since her disappearance from Karachi in 2003 till the alleged shooting during her arrest in Afghanistan in 2008?

A Harper magazine story from last November, 2009 issue has a detailed report on Aafia Siddiqui's ordeal from 2003 to the start of her trial in 2009. It has multiple conflicting accounts from many sources including Pakistani officials and Aafia's family.

As the Harper reporter Petra Bartosiewicz explains it, "The charges against her stem solely from the shooting incident itself, not from any alleged act of terrorism. The prosecutors provide no explanation for how a scientist, mother, and wife came to be charged as a dangerous felon. Nor do they account for her missing years, or her two other children, who still are missing. What is known is that the United States wanted her in 2003, and it wanted her again in 2008, and now no one can explain why."

Bartosiewicz goes on to add:

The total number of men and women who have been kidnapped and imprisoned for U.S. intelligence-gathering purposes is difficult to determine. Apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, the main theaters of combat, Pakistan is our primary source of publicly known detainees—researchers at Seton Hall University estimated in 2006 that two thirds of the prisoners at Guantánamo were arrested in Pakistan or by Pakistani authorities—and so it is reasonable to assume that the country is also a major supplier of ghost detainees. Human Rights Watch has tracked enforced disappearances in Pakistan since before 2001. The group’s counterterrorism director, Joanne Mariner, told me that the number of missing persons in the country grew “to a flood” as U.S. counterterrorism operations peaked between 2002 and 2004. In that same three-year period, U.S. aid to Pakistan totaled $4.7 billion, up from $9.1 million in the three years prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Correlation does not prove causation, of course, but Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, did claim in his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire, that his country had delivered 369 Al Qaeda suspects to the United States for “millions of dollars” in bounties (a boast he neatly elides in the Urdu edition). It is reasonable to suspect this figure is on the low side.

Aafia Siddiqui’s elderly maternal uncle, Shams ul Hassan Faruqi, a geologist, says almost everyone the reporter spoke to is lying. Faruqi told her an entirely different story. He said Siddiqui showed up at his house unannounced one evening in January 2008, a time when, according to a Pakistani intelligence officer she was supposedly in the hands of the CIA. Her face had been altered, Faruqi said, as if she had undergone plastic surgery, but he knew her by her voice. She said she had been held by the Pakistanis and the Americans and was now running operations for both of them against Al Qaeda. She had slipped away for a few days, though, because she wanted him to smuggle her across the border into Afghanistan so she could seek sanctuary with the Taliban, members of which Faruqi had known from his years of mineral exploration.

Speculation is rife that Siddiqui could have been working as a double agent for at least part of the time she was gone missing. It's possible that she lost trust of her American handlers, which led to her arrest, shooting, and the recent conviction in New York.

The Harper reporter concluded by quoting Afia's sister Fowzia as saying," I’d love it if a real investigator would come and devote himself to the case. You know, really work on it.”

Even the evidence presented on the narrow shooting charges appeared to leave considerable doubt about the guilt of the accused, already labeled "Lady al Qaeda" by some of the American media. The statements by several witnesses were contradictory, and no credible evidence was presented linking the accused to the gun allegedly used by her in shooting. None of the soldiers or the FBI agents was hurt. Only the accused was shot in the stomach during the incident. But these holes did not prevent the jury from reaching a unanimous verdict of guilt.

Here is how a New York based human rights attorney Joanne Mariner described Siddiqui's trial:

A trial's narrative is always tightly circumscribed by the rules of evidence and the demands of relevance. In this instance, however, the constraints of the trial narrative have seemed especially limiting. Not only has the question of whether Siddiqui spent months or years in a secret prison not been thoroughly explored, the fate of her two missing children has not been clarified.

"If You Were in Secret Prisons"

To the extent that claims about a secret prison surfaced at trial, it was largely because Siddiqui herself – sometimes in courtroom outbursts – raised them. Siddiqui's defense lawyers did little to draw out information about Siddiqui's possible CIA detention, and the government clearly wanted the topic to go away.

If Siddiqui's lawyers had wanted to explore the question, they faced two major obstacles. First, the government was uncooperative; it refused to provide any information about the Bush administration's system of secret CIA detention, claiming that such information was classified. Second, Siddiqui did not cooperate with her legal team, leaving them without a possible firsthand source of information.

The issue nonetheless arose on the very first day of trial. Captain Robert Snyder, a US Army officer who was stationed in Ghazni at the time of Siddiqui's arrest, was describing the documents that Siddiqui was said to be carrying when she was arrested.

For much of the morning, Siddiqui had rested her head on the defense table, suggesting that she was not paying close attention to the testimony. But as Snyder began listing the writing on some of the documents –words like "dirty bomb," "lethal radiation," "deadly fallout," "Empire State Building," "Brooklyn Bridge" – Siddiqui suddenly interrupted him, upset.

"If you were in secret prisons," she said, her voice growing louder, "[and] your children were tortured ... " As the judge motioned for her to be removed from the courtroom, she continued: "This is not plans for New York City; I was never planning to bomb it! You're lying!"

The subject came up again the next week when Siddiqui herself was on the witness stand, tense and uncomfortable under grilling by the prosecutor.

During direct examination by one of her defense attorneys, the topic of secret prisons did not arise, but when the prosecutor started to discuss the documents that had allegedly been in Siddiqui's possession, Siddiqui interrupted her.

"If they're in a secret prison, they see their children tortured in front of them ... "

"That's not responsive," the judge ruled, after the prosecutor complained. "Strike the testimony."

"You Told Special Agent Sercer That You Had Been in Hiding for Several Years"

Later in Siddiqui's cross-examination, the prosecutor came up with a very different version of how Siddiqui spent her missing years. Describing Siddiqui's conversations with an FBI agent who spent time with her at Bagram Air Base while she was receiving medical care there, the prosecutor challenged Siddiqui's story of secret detention.

"At Bagram," the prosecutor insisted, "you told Special Agent Sercer that you had been in hiding for several years."

The prosecutor got a chance to develop the story further when Special Agent Sercer, an FBI intelligence analyst, took the stand. Asked whether Siddiqui had discussed her whereabouts during the years before her 2008 arrest, Sercer said that Siddiqui had said she'd been in hiding.

"She would move from place to place," Sercer said Siddiqui had told her. "She married someone so that her name would be changed. She stayed indoors a lot."

Sercer's version of the story coincides with what Siddiqui's first husband, from whom she divorced in 2002, has told journalists. He claims that Siddiqui was seen at her house in the years between 2003 and 2008, and that he himself saw her in Karachi.

A Diversion or a Crime

In his closing argument, the prosecutor dismissed Siddiqui's references to torture and secret prisons, calling them "a classic diversion." The case "isn't about that," he insisted: It's about what happened in a police station in Ghazni, Afghanistan.

What this case shows is that Muslims are currently a despised minority in the West these days. What we are seeing is reminiscent of the McCarthy era Red Scare or the WW II era anti-Japanese sentiments against Muslims in America. Even the US judiciary appears to have been swayed by the current environment, just as it was when the US Supreme Court approved of the internment camps to isolate and hold Japanese Americans during the second world war.

Given the environment of deep suspicion and fear of Muslims, all norms of fairness and rule of law are being ignored in the US when it comes to justice for any one with a Muslim name who gets accused of anything smacking of violence or terrorism.