[Reader-list] Aafia Siddiqui: The Terror-Industrial Complex

[Kshmendra Kaul]

In my opinion, the jury-of-ordinary-citizens followed in the USA is a stupid system and only idiots would give it any kind of credible possibility that it can consistently deliver just judgements. Many factors can and will cloud competent and diligent evaluation of the evidence/arguments presented in court.
 
Is Dr Aafia's case yet another one of "Going Muslim" or is it yet another case of incarceration of innocents by USA/Pakistan/Afghanistan in pursuance of 'War on Terror'.
 
Either way it is extremely sad.
 
In what should be an indication of the mental state of Dr Aafia it has been reported that she wanted a meeting with President Obama and had the following statements to make on 9/11:
 
- "The President has to talk to me and this is the last opportunity I have once I'm sentenced … God, it's important, and please don't ignore me for the sake of God and this beautiful country."
 
- "I have information about attacks, more than 9/11, I want to help the president to end this group, to finish them," 
 
- "They are a domestic, US group, they are not Muslims. I am not lying, I swear"
 
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local-beat/Trial-Begins-for-Reputed-al-Qaida-Supporter--82049022.html
 
http://www.businessrecorder.com.pk/index.php?id=1010805&currPageNo=4&query=&search=&term=&supDate=
 
 
 
Kshmendra
 
 

--- On Wed, 2/10/10, Paul D. Miller <anansi1 at earthlink.net> wrote:


From: Paul D. Miller <anansi1 at earthlink.net>
Subject: [Reader-list] Aafia Siddiqui: The Terror-Industrial Complex
To: "sarai" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Date: Wednesday, February 10, 2010, 3:04 AM


reasonably interesting article
Paul

The Terror-Industrial Complex

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_terror-industrial_complex_20100208/ 

Truthdig Posted on Feb 8, 2010

By Chris Hedges

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.

AP / Fareed Khan

Mohammad Ahmed, son of Aafia Siddiqui, takes part in a
demonstration arranged by Human Rights Network. A
Progressive Journal of News and Opinion. Editor, Robert
Scheer. Publisher, Zuade Kaufman. Copyright (c) 2010
Truthdig, L.L.C. All rights reserved. Web site
development by Hop Studios | Hosted by NEXCESS.NET


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