Video: Andy Worthington Speaks at “Bring Aafia Siddiqui Home,” November 14, 2010

5.12.10

On November 14 — a very rainy Sunday in London — I was one of a number of speakers who gathered outside the Pakistani embassy for an event, “Bring Aafia Home,” which was organized by the Justice for Aafia Coalition, to urge the Pakistani government to do all it can to secure the return of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui to Pakistan, to rescue her from the 86-year prison sentence that this MIT-trained neouroscientist received in a New York court in September this year after what can only objectively be regarded as a rigged trial designed to consign her to oblivion in a US prison, and to permanently hide the evidence that she spent five years as a “ghost prisoner” in a secret prison — or secret prisons — run by the CIA.

A video of the short talk I gave at the event is below, via YouTube, and videos of other speakers from the day can be found on the Justice for Aafia Coalition’s YouTube channel. For further information, please check out the JFAC website, and my archive of articles here, and, in particular, my latest article about Aafia’s case, Wikileaks: Numerous Reasons to Dismiss US Claims that “Ghost Prisoner” Aafia Siddiqui Was Not Held in Bagram, which I wrote exclusively for JFAC, and which was originally published on the JFAC website.

And please — if this case moves you at all — send a card or letter to Aafia, to let her know that she has not been forgotten, and to ensure that those responsible for her — in a facility called the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, which has a terrible reputation for violence and abuse — know that the outside world is watching.

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.