3.12.10
In sifting through the avalanche of US diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks, only the Guardian, in the Western media, has picked up on cables from Islamabad relating to the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist who disappeared with her three young children in Karachi on March 30, 2003, and did not reappear until July 17, 2008, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, where she was reportedly arrested by Afghan forces for acting strangely, allegedly carrying a bag that contained a list of US targets for terrorist attacks as well as bomb-making instructions and assorted chemicals. When US soldiers turned up, Dr. Siddiqui then reportedly seized a gun and shot at them. Although she failed to hit her targets, at point-blank range, she was herself shot twice in the abdomen, and was then rendered to the United States, where she was put on trial for attempted murder, and was convicted and given an 86-year prison sentence in September this year.
Dr. Siddiqui’s supporters, and many commentators — myself included — who have examined her story have, for many years, had reason to doubt the official narrative about her capture in 2008, and her whereabouts for the previous five years.
While both the Pakistani and US authorities repeatedly denied that Dr. Siddiqui was in their custody between 2003 and 2008, and this is reiterated in one of the cables released by Wikileaks, in which US diplomats in Pakistan stated that “Bagram officials have assured us that they have not been holding Siddiqui for the last four years, as has been alleged,” several former prisoners — and one still held — have stated that they saw her in Bagram. The following exchange is an excerpt from an interview conducted by former prisoner Moazzam Begg with Binyam Mohamed, the British resident who was subjected to torture in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, after his release from Guantánamo in February 2009:
Moazzam Begg: When you were in the Bagram Detention Facility after being held in the “Dark Prison,” you came across a female prisoner. Can you describe a little bit about who you think she is and what you saw of her?
Binyam Mohamed: In Bagram, I did come across a female who wore a shirt with the number of “650,” and I saw her several times, and I heard a lot of stories about her from the guards and the other prisoners over there.
Moazzam Begg: And these stories said what about her, in terms of her description and her background?
Binyam Mohamed: What we were told first … we were frightened by the guards not to communicate with her, because they feared that we would talk to her and we would know who she was. So they told us that she was a spy from Pakistan, working with the government, and the Americans brought her to Bagram.
Moazzam Begg: So you think they spread the rumour that she was a spy … that would have kept you away from her and apprehensive towards her?
Binyam Mohamed: Basically, nobody talked to her in the facility, and she was held in isolation, where … she was only brought out to the main facility just to use the toilet. But all I knew about her was that she was from Pakistan, and that she had studied, or she had lived in America. And the guards would talk a lot about her, and I did actually see her picture when I was here a few weeks ago, and I would say she’s the very person I saw in Bagram.
Moazzam Begg: And that’s the very picture I showed you of Aafia Siddiqui?
Binyam Mohamed: That’s the very picture I saw.
Moazzam Begg: There have been all sorts of rumours about what happened to her — and may Allah free her soon — but part of those rumours include her being terribly abused. Do you have any knowledge of what abuse she might have faced?
Binyam Mohamed: Apart from her being in isolation — and the fact that I saw, when she was walking up and down, I could tell that she was severely disturbed — I don’t think she was in her right mind — literally, I don’t think she was sane — and I didn’t feel anything at that time, because, as far as I was concerned, she was a hypocrite working with the other governments. But had we known that she was a sister, I don’t think we would have been silent. I think there would have been a lot of maybe even riots in Bagram.
In March 2010, at a rally organized by the Justice for Aafia Coalition, former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes stated that, as well as Binyam Mohamed, Hassan bin Attash (a former child prisoner who is still held in Guantánamo) and Dr. Ghairat Baheer (a former “ghost prisoner” held in various secret prisons in Afghanistan) also described seeing Aafia Siddiqui in Bagram. Omar said, “They told me how she cried and sobbed, how she screamed and cried and banged her head, in despair and sorrow.”
The Justice for Aafia Coalition has also been gathering other testimony about Dr. Siddiqui’s presence in Bagram from other sources, locating the following statement by Abu Yahya al-Libi, who escaped from Bagram in July 2005, which resonates with the recollections of Binyam Mohamed, Hassan bin Attash and Dr. Baheer:
There is a woman from Pakistan. She stayed two complete years in solitary confinement in Bagram prison among more than 500 men. She would go out to the bathroom, led by the Americans, placing his hand on one of her shoulders, and the other hand on her back, and her hands and feet chained together, and she is treated in exactly the same way as a man … even in her clothing, the orange suit that the brothers wear in Guantánamo and the mujahideen in Bagram. This woman stayed there until she lost her mind, until she became insane, hitting the door and screaming, all day and night, and those ones all they do is make it worse by calling her by her number 650, that’s the number she had in the Bagram prison… “What’s the problem?” And she didn’t find a person to talk to. She is in solitary confinement, in front of her is a solitary room belonging to a man, on her side is a solitary room belonging to a man, and next to her is a solitary room belonging to a man, She didn’t find a woman to talk to, she only sees men … so the woman lost her reasoning and her mind and she stayed in this condition for two complete years… probably no one knew anything about her.
In addition, two of Aafia Siddiqui’s three children have stated that they were also held in custody during the period that their mother’s whereabouts are unexplained, adding another chilling dimension to the story. Although it is feared that Suleman, who was just a baby in March 2003, was killed at the time of her capture, her eldest son Ahmed (who was seven at the time) and her daughter Mariam (who was five) eventually reappeared. Ahmed, who was seized with his mother in Ghazni in July 2008, and was released to his mother’s family in October 2009, issued the following statement about his capture and his lost years:
I do not remember the date but it seems a long time ago. I remember we were going to Islamabad in a car when we were stopped by different cars and high roof ones. My mother was screaming and I was screaming as they took me away. I looked around and saw my baby brother on the ground and there was blood. My mother was crying and screaming. Then they put something on my face. And I don’t remember anything.
When I woke up I was in a room. There were American soldiers in uniform and plain clothes people. They kept me in different places. If I cried or didn’t listen, they beat me and tied me and chained me. There were English speaking, Pashto and Urdu speaking. I had no courage to ask who they were. At times, for a long time, I was alone in a small room. Then I was taken to some children’s prison where there were lots of other children.
The American Consular, who came to me in Kabul jail, said, “Your name is Ahmed. You are American. Your mother’s name is Aafia Siddiqui and your younger brother is dead. After that they took me away from the kids’ prison and I met the Pakistani Consular, and I talked to my aunt (Fowzia Siddiqui).”
Mariam did not reappear until April this year, when unidentified men delivered her to her aunt’s house. Now 12 years old, she was identified as Aafia Siddiqui’s daughter (and Ahmed’s sister) through DNA tests. At a press conference, Senator Talha Mehmood, the Chairman of the Senate Committee for the Interior, reported that Mariam “was recovered from Bagram airbase in the custody of an American — in the Urdu language press, an American soldier — called ‘John.’ He also said that she had been kept for seven years in a ‘cold, dark room’ in Bagram airbase.” Although this story has not been independently verified, and it may be that Mariam was held in some other facility, no other explanation has been provided to explain her whereabouts for the previous seven years.
These are just some of the reasons to doubt the assertion made by US diplomats in Pakistan, in one of the cables released by Wikileaks, and also to doubt the conviction with which Declan Walsh followed up on the cable, writing in the Guardian, “Contrary to claims by supporters of Aafia Siddiqui, the controversial Pakistani neuroscientist was never imprisoned at the Bagram military prison in Afghanistan, the embassy cables suggest.”
Other reasons to doubt the assertion include previously reported shadiness on the part of diplomats, who initially told the journalist Yvonne Ridley (who has spent many years doggedly pursuing the truth about Dr. Siddiqui) that no women had been held in Bagram, although it was later revealed that they had lied. Shortly after the incident in Ghazni, Lt. Col. Rumi Nielson-Greene, a spokesperson for Combined Joint Task Force 101, which manages the Bagram base, “said that a woman had been held at Bagram in 2003, but that woman, identified only as ‘Shafila,’ was released.” This was a fascinating insight, because the timeframe involved — during 2003 — appears to confirm that the witnesses cited above, who saw a woman at Bagram in 2004, were not mistaking Aafia Siddiqui for this other poor woman, whose whereabouts are, of course, unknown.
Even more significant is the well-chronicled failure of senior Bush administration officials to keep State Department officials in the loop about almost anything of substance to do with the “War on Terror.”
In 2009, when I interviewed Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former Chief of Staff, Wilkerson told me, in no uncertain terms, that the State Department had been excluded from correspondence relating to the conduct of the “War on Terror,” although the team gathered around Dick Cheney — a “War Council” consisting of just six men — had been monitoring the State Department’s responses to the results of Cheney’s activities. Wilkerson said:
I understood that there was a team, I understood it was highly placed and probably under the Vice President, I understood that it was membered in almost every aspect of the interagency group that dealt with national security, I understood they had a strategy, I understood they were ruthless in carrying out that strategy, and I understood that I was a day late and a dollar short, because they’d beaten me to the marketplace. But it took me a while to figure that out. I even figured out that they were reading my emails, but I wasn’t reading theirs.
Another reason for doubting the diplomats’ denials concerns the timing of Dr. Siddiqui’s capture, and its place within the bigger picture of the capture of supposed “high-value detainees” who were subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture in a variety of secret prisons, including, in many cases, a secret facility within Bagram. Whether accurately or not, it has been claimed that Dr, Siddiqui had remarried, before her capture, and that her second husband was Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (aka Ammar al-Baluchi), a nephew of the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Dr. Siddiqui was seized just four weeks after KSM, and four weeks before Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and it is easy, therefore, to see that a confession extracted under torture from KSM — when he was being subjected to waterboarding on 183 separate occasions in a secret prison in Poland — could have led to Dr. Siddiqui’s capture, which, in turn, could have led to the capture — perhaps through information also extracted through the use of torture — of Ali Abdul Aziz Ali.
If this sequence is correct — and it certainly makes a lot of sense — then it is appropriate to conclude that Dr. Siddiqui was held as a “ghost prisoner” in a secret prison, and it does not take too much reflection to realize that, as a result, her mysterious reappearance in Afghanistan in July 2008, the implausible story of her attempts to murder US soldiers (even though no fingerprints were found on the gun), her rendition to the United States rather than facing justice in Afghanistan, the sham of a trial that focused only on the murder attempt, and not on the terrorist materials allegedly found on her at the time of her capture, and the disproportionately large sentence are all part of a cover-up, designed to dispose of a used-up “ghost prisoner,” who knew too much — and was, conceivably, too horribly abused — to be released.
Unlike KSM, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and 12 other “high-value detainees,” for example, Dr. Siddiqui could not be sealed up in Guantánamo (where these men were sent from secret prisons in September 2006), because the presence of a female prisoner would have caused an uproar. In addition, she could not, like prisoners from other countries, be repatriated without that also causing an uproar, unlike a number of Libyan men who were stealthily repatriated from secret prisons in 2006.
These men included Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who ran a training camp in Afghanistan that was closed down by the Taliban because he refused to work with Osama bin Laden, but after his capture in late 2001 he was sent by the CIA to Egypt, where he was tortured until he falsely confessed that Saddam Hussein had met with members of al-Qaeda to discuss the use of chemical and biological weapons. That false confession was used a part of the justification for the invasion of Iraq, in March 2003, but once al-Libi was used up — after several years in other secret prisons — he was returned to Libya, where, implausibly but conveniently for the US and LIbya, he died, reportedly by committing suicide, in May 2009.
For Aafia Siddiqui, the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, where she is now held, may not be quite as notorious as Abu Salim prison in Tripoli — where around 1,200 prisoners were killed in a massacre in 1996 — or Bagram, because of its dark fame in the “War on Terror,” but to those in the know, it is, as Yvonne Ridley explained, known as the “Hospital of Horrors,” where more than 100 young women “have died in the last 10 years under ‘questionable circumstances’ with families unable to obtain autopsy reports,” and where there have been numerous cases of sex abuse.
Please write to Aafia at Carswell, not only to let her know that she has not been forgotten, but also because the most effective way to ensure that abusers think twice about their abuse is when they know that the outside world is watching — and is watching in large numbers. The address for the prison is here, and if you’re interested, I urge you to take advantage of the Justice for Aafia Coalition’s pre-printed cards, available here, which can easily be distributed to friends and family.
As published exclusively on the website of the Justice for Aafia Coalition. Cross-posted on The Public Record, Uruknet, Dandelion Salad and Prison Watch for Imprisoned Women.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in the UK, and available on DVD here), and my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.
Investigative journalist, author, campaigner, commentator and public speaker. Recognized as an authority on Guantánamo and the “war on terror.” Co-founder, Close Guantánamo and We Stand With Shaker. Also, photo-journalist (The State of London), and singer and songwriter (The Four Fathers).
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15 Responses
Tweets that mention Wikileaks: Numerous Reasons to Dismiss US Claims that “Ghost Prisoner” Aafia Siddiqui Was Not Held in Bagram | Andy Worthington -- Topsy.com says...
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Andy Worthington, Susan Hall. Susan Hall said: Wikileaks: Numerous Reasons to Dismiss US Claims that “Ghost Prisoner” Aafia Siddiqui Was Not Held.. http://bit.ly/eKFI18 […]
...on December 3rd, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Norwegian Shooter says...
Wow, Siddiqui’s case has to be the weirdest. I think it wise to have a reasonable doubt about all but the undisputed facts of the story, which are few and far between. One question, the Harper’s article last year claimed Begg “was not even at Bagram during the years Siddiqui was missing.” Is that true?
...on December 3rd, 2010 at 7:56 pm
Andy Worthington says...
This is the most detailed analysis I’ve done, Norwegian Shooter, and it remains a case full of extremely suspicious holes, with very few facts attached. However, it’s the supposed KSM/Ammar al-Baluchi connection that swings it for me, although it’s impossible, of course, to ascertain whether Aafia had any knowledge of anything, or whether she was tortured until it appeared that she did.
As for Moazzam, he left Bagram for Guantanamo several months before Aafia would have been there, so I wonder if he heard the cries of this woman Shafila, and thought it was his wife, or if other women were also held, about whom we have heard nothing. I don’t believe in general that many women were held in Afghanistan — unlike Iraq or the 2007 operation in Kenya, for example — but it’s clear that both women and children were not regarded as off-limits when it came to illegal and abusive detention.
...on December 3rd, 2010 at 9:11 pm
Carlyle Moulton says...
The fact that the US authorities are going to so much trouble to keep Aafia Siddiqui incommunicado is in my mind the smoking gun. She was not at her show trial allowed to introduce any evidence as to her whereabouts for the preceding five years and if she was in US custody until just before her strange appearance on an Afghanistan street that would have been extremely relevant and undermining to the prosecution case against her as it would have shown that the whole series of events leading up to her shooting and her alleged attempt to murder US soldiers.involved the US acting in bad faith.
Every attempt by Aafia’s brother to visit her is being stonewalled and this I suspect is because they cannot afford any witness independent of the US Government hearing her explanation of where she has been between her 2003 kidnapping in Pakistan and her 2008 arrival on a Ghazni Afghanistan street. As soon as someone not connected with the US Government relays her story to the world the manure hits the fast whirling blades.
...on December 4th, 2010 at 9:09 am
Carlyle Moulton says...
I also think that it is significant that Aafia’s children have not spoken about their whereabouts while they were missing except for the one short statement that Ahmed made to Yvonne Ridley. Is it being excessively conspiratorial to suggest that they have been coerced into silence by threats either to Aafia or themselves?
The fact is that agencies of the Pakistan state are complicit in the kidnapping of Aafia and her children and while many are so naive as to think the US incapable of assassinations, threats of murder and despicable tricks, no one can have any doubt that the ISI or other Pakistani agencies are capable of doing so.
...on December 4th, 2010 at 9:22 am
Andy Worthington says...
Excellent comments, Carlyle. Thanks. At the Cageprisoners event at London Muslim Centre on Wednesday, Yvonne Ridley mentioned how Aafia’s brother was being prevented from meeting her, and it’s impossible not to conclude from that, as you say, that the US government doesn’t want anyone relaying her story to the outside world.
Also, excellent points re: the refusal to allow discussions of her whereabouts pre-2008 at her trial, and the silence of her children (with the exception of that one statement made by Ahmed).
Hopefully, film of Wednesday’s event will be made available soon.
...on December 4th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Carlyle Moulton says...
It may well be that Aafia’s distrust of “her” lawyers and attempt to replace them is well warranted. It would seem to me that if she told her lawyers her whereabouts during the missing 5 years it would be their duty to a client to get that information to the world even if it could not produce it in court.
If her lawyers are constrained by agreements made with the US government that prevent them relaying anything she says to the outside world on pain of prosecution this is in itself relevant information giving rise to justified suspicion. If the lawyers are not so constrained and refuse to relay information it is evidence that they perhaps were not really working for their nominal client but for the US and Pakistani governments.
...on December 4th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Carlyle Moulton says...
The idea that Aafia’s lawyers are restrained by legal agreements not to relay information from Aafia to the outside world is not absurd. Former lawyer Lynne Stewart is doing 10 years for breaching just such an agreement when she relayed a message from her client accused and convicted of terrorism to some of his associates.
Such gag agreements on lawyers should be the object of suspicion as they can be used to hide wrong doing by the authorities
...on December 4th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Thanks again, Carlyle. Good points, but as we’ve seen before — the case of Jose Padilla springs to mind — it seems there is little that lawyers can do when the court is stacked against them, and refuses to allow any discussion of hidden truth — in Padilla’s case, the long years he, an American citizen, spent being tortured as an “enemy combatant” on the US mainland; in Aafia’s case, the missing five years.
I actually think her lawyers did their best to publicize her case outside of court, but I agree that what happened to Lynne Stewart is a chilling reminder of how pressure can now be exerted to keep lawyers quiet.
...on December 4th, 2010 at 10:57 pm
Andy Worthington says...
On Facebook, Annabelle Parker wrote:
Thanks Andy for telling us about Aafia, what a horrible story, may truth prevail.
...on December 4th, 2010 at 10:58 pm
Carlyle Moulton says...
Andy.
My point about Aafia’s lawyers is this:-
If Aafia was indeed held by the Americans for five years, surely she has told her lawyers this fact. The question then becomes why have these lawyers not relayed this to the world. Perhaps we cannot blame the lawyers for failing to get such evidence into court since they were prevented from doing this by an alliance of biased judge with the prosecution, but surely we should expect them to get it into the court of public opinion.
There needs to be a focus on the techniques used to prevent Aafia from getting her own story out into the world.
...on December 5th, 2010 at 9:38 am
WikiLeaks: Numerous Reasons to Dismiss US Claims that “Ghost Prisoner” Aafia Siddiqui Was Not Held in Bagram + Bring Aafia Home « Dandelion Salad says...
[…] Andy Worthington Featured Writer Dandelion Salad http://www.andyworthington.co.uk 3 December, 2010 Image via […]
...on December 6th, 2010 at 2:06 am
Tasnova Tansim says...
Sorry for late comment.I just came to know about the horrible facts of Dr. aafia. I am a medical student and in a facebook page of medicos someone mentioned her case as she was a brilliant neuroscientist. Then I read some of articles written about her case.I am so overwhelmed to know about her pathetic fate that I just can’t drive her thought out of my mind since I have known her story.It is really very sorrowful. I just don’t understand what was the motive behind her kidnapping in 2003?There is no prove that she harmed anyone or preached violence. She is in federal medical centre now,is anything known about her current condition?
...on April 12th, 2018 at 1:43 pm
Andy Worthington says...
Hi Tasnova,
Good to hear from you. This is such a terrible story, and one with no satisfactory ending, it seems. I haven’t heard anything lately at all about her, or how she might be faring in the facility in which she’s being held, the Carswell Federal Medical Center.
I see that there were vigils in the US last month: https://www.wrmea.org/human-rights/human-rights-defenders-hold-vigils-for-aafia-siddiqui.html
And her case was also mentioned by Cori Crider in an article about the unsuitability of Gina Haspel to be CIA Director: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/ten-questions-for-gina-haspels-confirmation-hearings/555530/
There’s also an interesting interview with her sister Fowzia here, from November 2016: https://onesmallwindow.wordpress.com/2016/11/06/saving-prisoner-650-dr-aafia-siddiqui/
And here’s the campaign Fowzia runs: https://www.facebook.com/FreeAafiaSiddiquiNow/
http://aafiamovement.com
...on April 12th, 2018 at 11:51 pm
WikiLeaks: Numerous Reasons to Dismiss US Claims that “Ghost Prisoner” Aafia Siddiqui Was Not Held in Bagram + Bring Aafia Home – Dandelion Salad says...
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...on January 16th, 2022 at 9:00 pm