Aafia Siddiqui

On September 18, I was delighted to be asked to attend “Eid Without Aafia,” and to conduct a live interview with former Guantánamo prisoners Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed. The event, in east London, was organized by the Justice for Aafia Coalition to raise awareness about the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist [...]

I’m cross-posting below an extraordinary account by former Guantánamo prisoner (and Cageprisoners director) Moazzam Begg of his first visit to Pakistan since he was abducted from his house in Islamabad on January 31, 2002, and subsequently held in US custody — in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo — for three years. Moazzam’s account includes retracing his [...]

To be honest, I can hardly express sufficiently my shock at the news that Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who was rendered to the US to face a trial after she reportedly tried — and failed — to shoot two US soldiers in Ghazni, Afghanistan in July 2008, has been sentenced to 86 years [...]

Today, please spare a thought for Omar Khadr, the only Canadian citizen in Guantánamo, who was seized in Afghanistan on July 27, 2002, when he was just 15 years old. Omar is 24 years old today, and has grown, physically, into a man during the eight years and two months he has spent in US [...]

At the end of this month, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist, is due to be sentenced in New York, after a trial earlier this year resulted in her conviction for opening fire on FBI agents and US military personnel in a police station in Ghazni, Afghanistan, where she was being interrogated in 2008. I [...]

I recently watched (for the first time, I concede), the film “In the Name of the Father,” about the Guildford Four, in which Emma Thompson plays the part of Gareth Peirce, who exposed the abhorrent miscarriage of justice in that dreadful case of torture and false confessions, which was only overturned after Gerry Conlon, Paul [...]

One month ago, I addressed the disturbing case of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in an article marking “Aafia Siddiqui Day,” in which I ran through what I regarded as some of the particularly pertinent questions to ask regarding her disappearance for five years, the whereabouts of her three children (who disappeared with her in [...]

Today is the seventh anniversary of the day that Pakistani neuroscientist Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and her three young children were reportedly abducted in Karachi, leading to Aafia’s disappearance for over five years — when she was apparently held in secret prisons and subjected to appalling abuse — before she resurfaced in Afghanistan and supposedly attempted [...]

The British human rights group Cageprisoners has just published a fascinating interview with Binyam Mohamed, the British resident, subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, who was freed from Guantánamo on February 23. I have covered Binyam’s story in great depth over the last few years (see the list of articles at the end of this [...]

On September 11, the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I had the pleasure of being interviewed once again by Linda Olson-Osterlund for the “News and Public Affairs Special” show on KBOO FM in Portland, Oregon. The interview, available here, was part of a 9/11 Special, and Linda and I had the opportunity to follow [...]