Human Rights Supporters Call for Freedom for Aafia Siddiqui
By Elaine Pasquini
Dallas, TX: On November 10, the Dallas-Ft. Worth and Austin chapters of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) hosted an online program titled “Injustice: Dr Aafia & the 20-Year Legacy of America’s Wars” to discuss the campaign to free Dr Aafia Siddiqui from the American prison where she has been held since 2010, serving an 86-year sentence.
After studying at Brandeis University in the United States where she graduated with a PhD in neuroscience, Siddiqui returned to Pakistan in 2002 with her three children where she was the subject of rendition from Karachi in March of 2003. For the next five years her whereabouts were unknown. According to her attorney, Marwa Elbially, Siddiqui maintains that she was held in a prison at the former US military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, although the US government denies this assertion.
She was flown to the US and indicted in a New York federal district court in September 2008 on charges of assault and attempted murder of a US Army captain in the police station in Ghazni, Afghanistan, on July 18, 2008, while being interrogated for allegedly having ties to terrorists.
After 18 months in detention, Siddiqui was tried and convicted in New York on Feb. 3, 2010, despite the forensic and scientific evidence presented during the trial proving that she could not have committed the crimes for which she was charged. No charge of terrorism was included in the indictment, although she was known in counterterrorism circles as “Lady Al-Qaeda,” which undoubtedly had an influence on the jury. “No one wants to be responsible for releasing Lady Al-Qaeda,” Elbially said.
Siddiqui’s attorney meets with her client once a month in Carswell Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth, Texas. Abrar Hashmi, Pakistan’s consul general based in Houston, also regularly visits the Pakistani neuroscientist.
Following the July 30 attack on Siddiqui by a fellow inmate who threw burning coffee in her face and began savagely beating the 49-year-old, the Pakistani government filed a complaint and requested an investigation into the assault. After being discovered by a prison guard, Siddiqui was removed from her cell in a wheelchair and forced into solitary confinement, according to Faiza Syed, executive director of CAIR’s Austin and Dallas-Ft. Worth chapters.
In 2018, Pakistan’s Senate unanimously passed a resolution calling her a “Daughter of the Nation.” While Prime Minister Imran Khan has several times pledged support to negotiate with the US government for her release, Pakistan still has not joined the Inter-American Convention on Serving Criminal Sentences Abroad, which could help to facilitate her repatriation to Pakistan.
“As I have been studying Dr Aafia’s case, I found out that many constitutional scholars and other high-level human rights defenders have said publicly that this is a travesty of justice, including some former high-ranking officials of the United States government,” said Linda Sarsour, executive director of MPower Change.
Siddiqui’s supporters, including the late former US attorney general Ramsey Clark, believe the MIT-educated mother of three was falsely accused, wrongly arrested, denied due process and unjustly imprisoned. According to attorney Steve Downs, co-founder of Project SALAM, Siddiqui’s arrest was based on false information.
The well-known academic Noam Chomsky has called Siddiqui’s conviction “an injustice,” which he hoped would be rectified.
El-Hajj Mauri’ Saalakhan, president of the Aafia Foundation, Inc., has worked tirelessly for years to bring attention to Siddiqui’s plight, including organizing a five-city mobilization which began in Houston in September and ended in Washington, DC on November 14. “Now that the five-city mobilizations are successfully behind us, it’s critical that we safeguard and build on the momentum we’ve achieved,” Saalakhan told this reporter. “If an injustice of this nature could be committed against someone like Aafia without challenge, none of us are safe.”
“Every person, if conscious, must raise their voice to condemn this outrageous travesty,” said Imam Zaid Shakir, co-founder of the Berkeley, CA-based Zaytuna Institute, in a statement. “Aafia’s real crime is being a practicing Muslim. Any of us could be in her place right now. If we do not raise our voices to make sure everyone in this country knows the magnitude of the injustice that has been done to her, we will all be vulnerable.”
Elbially is calling for the release, in its entirety, of the December 13, 2012, Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,000-page report on the CIA rendition, detention and interrogation that led to torture.
In conclusion, Sarsour noted: “The United States government has been good at fear-mongering around Muslims and terrorism and…when it comes to Muslims, people kind of move away and say ‘we’re not going to touch this.’ For some reason it becomes justified.”
“We are renewing her story and trying to get her story out to a large swath of people,” Sarsour explained. “She is the embodiment of a political prisoner. To have an 86-year sentence when no one’s life was taken is absolutely outrageous.”
“God is a miracle maker,” she said. “May Allah grant her freedom.”
(Elaine Pasquini is a freelance journalist. Her reports appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and Nuze.Ink.)
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