Opinion

Has Justice Been Served in Aafia Siddiqui's Conviction?
By Riaz Haq
CA

A New York jury has convicted 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 US 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 US counterterrorism operations peaked between 2002 and 2004. In that same three-year period, US aid to Pakistan totaled $4.7 billion, up from $9.1 million in the three years prior to the US 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.
The Harper reporter concludes 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.”