Most EU States Support Call for Israeli, Palestinian War Crimes Investigations; US and Canada Opposed
Human Rights Watch, February 26, 2010
“The UN resolution sends a strong message that Israel and Hamas need to conduct genuine investigations into the allegations of wartime abuses and punish those responsible. Governments are refusing to exempt the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from demands for justice made for other conflicts around the world.”
Steve Crawshaw, UN advocacy director at Human Rights Watch
(New York) – Today’s United Nations General Assembly resolution calling for impartial Gaza war crimes investigations is an important step toward justice for all civilian victims of last year’s conflict, Human Rights Watch said. A majority of UN members, including most European Union (EU) states, voted for the resolution, increasing pressure on Israel and Hamas to conduct credible investigations into the allegations of war crimes by their forces.
A November 2009 General Assembly resolution calling for credible domestic investigations by all parties to the conflict garnered support from only 5 EU member states.
“The UN resolution sends a strong message that Israel and Hamas need to conduct genuine investigations into the allegations of wartime abuses and punish those responsible,” said Steve Crawshaw, UN advocacy director at Human Rights Watch. “Governments are refusing to exempt the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from demands for justice made for other conflicts around the world.”
By a vote of 98 to 7, with 31 abstentions, the General Assembly called on Israel and Hamas to conduct thorough and impartial investigations into the serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law documented by the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (the Goldstone report). Fifty-six countries did not vote. The resolution requires Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to report back to the General Assembly within five months on the progress both parties have made.
The Goldstone report concluded that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.
Sixteen EU members voted for the resolution, including permanent Security Council members France and the United Kingdom.
The countries voting against were Canada, Israel, Macedonia, Micronesia, Nauru, Panama, and the United States.
“Washington’s objection to this resolution reveals a blatant double standard when it comes to international justice,” Crawshaw said. “Why should the victims of war crimes in Gaza not benefit from the same US demands for accountability as victims in Congo and Darfur?”
In its resolution on November 5, 2009, the General Assembly called on Israel and Hamas to conduct credible investigations within three months. In late January 2010, Israel and Hamas delivered their reports on domestic investigations to the UN. Based on those reports, Secretary-General Ban told the General Assembly on February 4 that, because the domestic processes were ongoing, “no determination can be made on the implementation of the resolution by the parties concerned.” He repeated his call on all parties “to carry out credible domestic investigations into the conduct of the Gaza conflict.”
Human Rights Watch has strongly criticized both Israel and Hamas for failing to conduct thorough and impartial investigations into the many alleged violations by their forces during the Gaza conflict.
To date, Israel has not prosecuted any soldier or commander for unlawful killings or other serious laws-of-war violations during the Gaza conflict. Nor has it conducted credible investigations into military policies that may have contravened the laws of war or facilitated war crimes. These include the targeting of Hamas political institutions and Gaza police; the use of heavy artillery and white phosphorus munitions in populated areas; and the rules of engagement for aerial drone operators and ground forces.
Hamas has not disciplined or prosecuted anyone for ordering or carrying out thousands of deliberate or indiscriminate rocket attacks against Israeli population centers before, during, and after the fighting in December 2008 and January 2009. Killings and other serious abuses by Hamas security forces against suspected collaborators and political rivals in Gaza have also gone unpunished.
“The United States, Canada, and other governments that voted against the Gaza resolution missed an opportunity to help break the cycle of violence and impunity that poses a major obstacle to the peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Crawshaw said.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Burning Quran - An Article
It is an excellent write up. Please circulate it to all your friends and acquaintences.
ON BURNING OF QURAN
Who is burning the Quran? A Christian priest? Ask a question, if I write the name of Jesus Christ on a piece of paper 29 times and give it to him to burn it, will he burn it? If I write the name of Moses on a piece of paper and give it to a Jew, will he burn it? What they intend to burn is the same. In the Quran the name of Jesus Christ is mentioned with great Honour 29 times and the name of Moses with dignity 129 times, while the name of Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon all of them) is mentioned just 4 times. In addition all the 24 prophets mentioned in the Quran are there in the Bible. Make them aware that they are burning the names of Jesus Christ, Moses and all 24 prophets. The problem is none of them have ever cared to read the Quran. My request to them is to read the Quran’s translation in their own language (easily available free in mosques and in Islamic Centers) and then decide whether burning the Quran is justified or not. I may assure them that they will highly regret in their lives when at a later date they read it. All the allegations of immorality on Mother Marry, Jesus Christ and other prophets mentioned in different books have been very neatly refuted in the Quran. Mother marry has been given the highest Honour amongst all the women of the World. Read it you will be enlightened. Birth of Moses and his marriage has been described in the most respectful manner. Not a single derogatory word has been used in the Quran for any of the prophets those mentioned in the Bible. Why burn the Quran? Burn those books in which baseless allegations have been put on many of the prophets of God. That will be fully justified. Once you read its translation, you will be convinced that it is the best book on earth, every word is of God, the God of Adam, Abraham, Moses and Jesus (peace be upon them all). Not a single word has changed in 1431 years. It is in its original, pristine form preserved in Turkey and in Leningrad.
It is totally a wrong concept that it was written by the prophet Muhammad (pbuh). How can a person who did not know how to read anything or write, can write a book of over 600 pages without any mistake, describing the advance theory of science and space? He could not even put his signature on the letters which he sent to the heads of states, he used to stamp them with a seal of his name. Moreover the Quran is in the highest literary form of Arabic language, which he did not speak; he used to speak colloquial Arabic. How can Quran be considered man made; a book which describes intricate embryological development of a fetus, space science, complicated oceanography and in over 1400 years no one has found any contradiction or any mistake? Every word of the Quran is the word of God, the same God of Adam, Abraham Moses and Jesus Christ. How can anyone even think of burning the words of your own God?
What is radical about Islam or the teachings of the Quran? Without reading it you call it radical! Bring a single copy of the Bible which is in its original form. What amount of changes is made in the Bible by men to the words of God? Who gave them the authority in the very first place to change the words of God, revise and re-revise the Bible? But still we do not call it radical. We also have appeal to the Muslims of the whole world don’t even think of burning a single copy of the Bible in retaliation because the Bible has the names of our 24 prophets whom all we respect from the core of our hearts.
Coming down to the most crucial point of 9/11: The allegation is again on the Muslim, so they decided to burn the Quran, stop building an Islamic Center in Manhattan near Ground Zero. Have a look at the documentaries made on the truth of 9/11. These documentaries are proved without the shadow of doubt there in the scenario of 9/11 in the year 2001, no Muslim was involved. In one of the documentary it said loud and clear that no Muslim is involved in 9/11 . Amazing, all the documentaries and films are made by Americans and that too Christians. Go through each and every documentary on U-Tube, you will be amazed, who did it - you have to decide yourself of course not any Muslim? The preparation was done three months before 9/11. If anyone considers these documentaries are not authentic, why can’t they take the producers to the courts and involve FBI to investigate how dare they can make such movie which has tarnished the image of America all over the world and the whole world had sunk in deep recession shattering the economy of all the countries. What benefit they achieved by doing so? Thousands of Americans were killed and even are being killed today. Trillions of Dollars have burnt in smoke, millions of innocent people were killed and other multimillions suffered. Why don’t these preachers of peace go after them who did it?
Why Muslims and why Quran?
ON BURNING OF QURAN
Who is burning the Quran? A Christian priest? Ask a question, if I write the name of Jesus Christ on a piece of paper 29 times and give it to him to burn it, will he burn it? If I write the name of Moses on a piece of paper and give it to a Jew, will he burn it? What they intend to burn is the same. In the Quran the name of Jesus Christ is mentioned with great Honour 29 times and the name of Moses with dignity 129 times, while the name of Prophet Mohammad (peace be upon all of them) is mentioned just 4 times. In addition all the 24 prophets mentioned in the Quran are there in the Bible. Make them aware that they are burning the names of Jesus Christ, Moses and all 24 prophets. The problem is none of them have ever cared to read the Quran. My request to them is to read the Quran’s translation in their own language (easily available free in mosques and in Islamic Centers) and then decide whether burning the Quran is justified or not. I may assure them that they will highly regret in their lives when at a later date they read it. All the allegations of immorality on Mother Marry, Jesus Christ and other prophets mentioned in different books have been very neatly refuted in the Quran. Mother marry has been given the highest Honour amongst all the women of the World. Read it you will be enlightened. Birth of Moses and his marriage has been described in the most respectful manner. Not a single derogatory word has been used in the Quran for any of the prophets those mentioned in the Bible. Why burn the Quran? Burn those books in which baseless allegations have been put on many of the prophets of God. That will be fully justified. Once you read its translation, you will be convinced that it is the best book on earth, every word is of God, the God of Adam, Abraham, Moses and Jesus (peace be upon them all). Not a single word has changed in 1431 years. It is in its original, pristine form preserved in Turkey and in Leningrad.
It is totally a wrong concept that it was written by the prophet Muhammad (pbuh). How can a person who did not know how to read anything or write, can write a book of over 600 pages without any mistake, describing the advance theory of science and space? He could not even put his signature on the letters which he sent to the heads of states, he used to stamp them with a seal of his name. Moreover the Quran is in the highest literary form of Arabic language, which he did not speak; he used to speak colloquial Arabic. How can Quran be considered man made; a book which describes intricate embryological development of a fetus, space science, complicated oceanography and in over 1400 years no one has found any contradiction or any mistake? Every word of the Quran is the word of God, the same God of Adam, Abraham Moses and Jesus Christ. How can anyone even think of burning the words of your own God?
What is radical about Islam or the teachings of the Quran? Without reading it you call it radical! Bring a single copy of the Bible which is in its original form. What amount of changes is made in the Bible by men to the words of God? Who gave them the authority in the very first place to change the words of God, revise and re-revise the Bible? But still we do not call it radical. We also have appeal to the Muslims of the whole world don’t even think of burning a single copy of the Bible in retaliation because the Bible has the names of our 24 prophets whom all we respect from the core of our hearts.
Coming down to the most crucial point of 9/11: The allegation is again on the Muslim, so they decided to burn the Quran, stop building an Islamic Center in Manhattan near Ground Zero. Have a look at the documentaries made on the truth of 9/11. These documentaries are proved without the shadow of doubt there in the scenario of 9/11 in the year 2001, no Muslim was involved. In one of the documentary it said loud and clear that no Muslim is involved in 9/11 . Amazing, all the documentaries and films are made by Americans and that too Christians. Go through each and every documentary on U-Tube, you will be amazed, who did it - you have to decide yourself of course not any Muslim? The preparation was done three months before 9/11. If anyone considers these documentaries are not authentic, why can’t they take the producers to the courts and involve FBI to investigate how dare they can make such movie which has tarnished the image of America all over the world and the whole world had sunk in deep recession shattering the economy of all the countries. What benefit they achieved by doing so? Thousands of Americans were killed and even are being killed today. Trillions of Dollars have burnt in smoke, millions of innocent people were killed and other multimillions suffered. Why don’t these preachers of peace go after them who did it?
Why Muslims and why Quran?
Dr. Aafia Siddiqui Sentencing
Dr. Aafia Siddiqui Sentencing
Posted On Wednesday, September 22, 2010 at at 11:37 AM by Owner
WAKE UP CALL TO NATIONAL LEADERS
GENERAL ASHFAQ KAYANI
NAWAZ SHARIF
ALTAF HUSSAIN
MUNAWAR HASAN
IMRAN KHAN
FAZLUR REHMAN
ASFANDYAR
FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION
AAFIA SIDDIQUI'S SENTENCING IS ANNOUNCED ON SEPT. 23 AND THE DOORS ARE CLOSED FOR HER.
Many of Siddiqui's supporters, including international human rights organizations, have claimed that Siddiqui was not an extremist and that she and her young children were illegally detained and interrogated by Pakistani intelligence during her five year disappearance, likely at the behest of the U.S. Siddiqui’s family has said she was abducted and tortured by U.S. intelligence.
After Siddiqui's conviction, she sent a message through her lawyer, saying that "she doesn’t want there to be violent protests or violent reprisals in Pakistan over this verdict." Her message indicates that she was neither an extremist nor terrorist. Thousands of students, political and social activists protested in Pakistan. Some shouted anti-American slogans, while burning the American flag and effigies of President Barack Obama in the streets. Her sister has spoken frequently and passionately on her behalf at rallies. Echoing her family's comments, and anti-U.S. sentiments, many believe she was picked up in Karachi in 2003, detained at the U.S. Bagram Airbase, and tortured, and that the charges against her were fabricated and / or exaggerated.
A petition was filed seeking action against the Pakistani government for it having not approached the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to have Siddiqui released from the United States. Barrister Javed Iqbal Jaffree said the CIA arrested Siddiqui in Karachi in 2003, and one of her sons was killed during her arrest.
In Pakistan, Siddiqui's February 2010 conviction was followed with expressions of support by many Pakistanis, who appeared increasingly anti-American, as well as by politicians and the news media, who characterized her as a symbol of victimization by the United States.
USA needs to understand that if the verdict is against her, people and soldiers of Pakistan will increasingly hate America Government and American people.
KHUDA KAY LEYAY SARAY LEADER APNI ZIMMADARI MEHSOOS KARAIN.
Posted On Wednesday, September 22, 2010 at at 11:37 AM by Owner
WAKE UP CALL TO NATIONAL LEADERS
GENERAL ASHFAQ KAYANI
NAWAZ SHARIF
ALTAF HUSSAIN
MUNAWAR HASAN
IMRAN KHAN
FAZLUR REHMAN
ASFANDYAR
FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION
AAFIA SIDDIQUI'S SENTENCING IS ANNOUNCED ON SEPT. 23 AND THE DOORS ARE CLOSED FOR HER.
Many of Siddiqui's supporters, including international human rights organizations, have claimed that Siddiqui was not an extremist and that she and her young children were illegally detained and interrogated by Pakistani intelligence during her five year disappearance, likely at the behest of the U.S. Siddiqui’s family has said she was abducted and tortured by U.S. intelligence.
After Siddiqui's conviction, she sent a message through her lawyer, saying that "she doesn’t want there to be violent protests or violent reprisals in Pakistan over this verdict." Her message indicates that she was neither an extremist nor terrorist. Thousands of students, political and social activists protested in Pakistan. Some shouted anti-American slogans, while burning the American flag and effigies of President Barack Obama in the streets. Her sister has spoken frequently and passionately on her behalf at rallies. Echoing her family's comments, and anti-U.S. sentiments, many believe she was picked up in Karachi in 2003, detained at the U.S. Bagram Airbase, and tortured, and that the charges against her were fabricated and / or exaggerated.
A petition was filed seeking action against the Pakistani government for it having not approached the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to have Siddiqui released from the United States. Barrister Javed Iqbal Jaffree said the CIA arrested Siddiqui in Karachi in 2003, and one of her sons was killed during her arrest.
In Pakistan, Siddiqui's February 2010 conviction was followed with expressions of support by many Pakistanis, who appeared increasingly anti-American, as well as by politicians and the news media, who characterized her as a symbol of victimization by the United States.
USA needs to understand that if the verdict is against her, people and soldiers of Pakistan will increasingly hate America Government and American people.
KHUDA KAY LEYAY SARAY LEADER APNI ZIMMADARI MEHSOOS KARAIN.
Aafia Siddiqui: For those who rarely read the fine print...
Plz dig deeper into the story of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui who was just sentenced yesterday in Judge Berman's court...
AP / Fareed Khan
Mohammad Ahmed, son of Aafia Siddiqui, takes part in a demonstration arranged by Human Rights Network.
OK, so you're new to the case and/or have considered the most intelligent thing to do re. Aafia Siddiqui to be let it go and let our "civilian court" handle things.
Chris Hedges, former journalist for the NYTimes, who's covered many "terrorist" stories, said: "I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see."
Consider his comments soon after Aafia's Jan-Feb Trial this year entitled
"The Terror-Industrial Complex"
The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security comes not from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe.
The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, 37, who received an undergraduate degree from MIT and a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University, often defies belief. Siddiqui, who could spend 50 years in prison on seven charges when she is sentenced in May, was by her own account abducted in 2003 from her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with her three children—two of whom remain missing—and spirited to a secret U.S. prison where she was allegedly tortured and mistreated for five years. The American government has no comment, either about the alleged clandestine detention or the missing children.
Siddiqui was discovered in 2008 disoriented and apparently aggressive and hostile, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, with her oldest son. She allegedly was carrying plans to make explosives, lists of New York landmarks and notes referring to “mass-casualty attacks.” But despite these claims the government prosecutors chose not to charge her with terrorism or links to al-Qaida—the reason for her original appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list six years ago. Her supporters suggest that the papers she allegedly had in her possession when she was found in Afghanistan, rather than detail coherent plans for terrorist attacks, expose her severe mental deterioration, perhaps the result of years of imprisonment and abuse. This argument was bolstered by some of the pages of the documents shown briefly to the court, including a crude sketch of a gun that was described as a “match gun” that operates by lighting a match.
“Justice was not served,” Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family, told me. “The U.S. government made a decision to label this woman a terrorist, but instead of putting her on trial for the alleged terrorist activity she was put on trial for something else. They tried to convict her of that something else, not with evidence, but because she was a terrorist. She was selectively prosecuted for something that would allow them to only tell their side of the story.”
The government built its entire case instead around disputed events in the 300-square-foot room of the Ghazni police station. It insisted that on July 18, 2008, the diminutive Siddiqui, who had been arrested by local Afghan police the day before, seized an M4 assault rifle that was left unattended and fired at American military and FBI agents. None of the Americans were injured. Siddiqui, however, was gravely wounded, shot twice in the stomach.
No one, other than Siddiqui, has attempted to explain where she was for five years after she vanished in 2003. No one seems to be able to explain why a disoriented Pakistani woman and her son, an American citizen, neither of whom spoke Dari, were discovered by local residents wandering in a public square in Ghazni, where an eyewitness told Harpers Magazine the distraught Siddiqui “was attacking everyone who got close to her.” Had Siddiqui, after years of imprisonment and torture, perhaps been at the U.S. detention center in Bagram and then dumped with one of her three children in Ghazi? And where are the other two children, one of whom also is an American citizen? In an article written by Petra Bartosiewicz in the November 2009 Harper’s Magazine, authorities in Afghanistan described a series of events at odds with the official version.
The events of the following day are also subject to dispute. According to the complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer, two FBI agents, and two military interpreters came to question Siddiqui at Ghazni’s police headquarters. The team was shown to a meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain. “None of the United States personnel were aware,” the complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.” No explanation is offered as to why no one thought to look behind it. The group sat down to talk and, in another odd lapse of vigilance, “the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.” Siddiqui, like a villain in a stage play, reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain “slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, then fell unconscious.
The authorities in Afghanistan describe a different series of events. The governor of Ghazni Province, Usman Usmani, told my local reporter that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: the U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a “senior Ghazni police officer” suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui, the Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.”
Siddiqui’s own version of the shooting is less complicated. As she explained it to a delegation of Pakistani senators who came to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after her arrest, she never touched anyone’s gun, nor did she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted, “She is loose,” and then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness she heard someone else say, “We could lose our jobs.”
Siddiqui’s defense team pointed out that there was an absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4, all of which suggested it had not been fired. They played a video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July 18. They also highlighted inconsistencies in the testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at times gave conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were sitting or standing and how many shots were fired.
Siddiqui, who took the stand during the trial against the advice of her defense team, called the report that she had fired the unattended M4 assault rifle at the Americans “the biggest lie.” She said she had been trying to flee the police station because she feared being tortured. Siddiqui, whose mental stability often appeared to be in question during the trial, was ejected several times from the Manhattan courtroom for erratic behavior and outbursts.
“It is difficult to get a fair trial in this country if the government wants to accuse you of terrorism,” said Foster. “It is difficult to get a fair trial on any types of charges. The government is allowed to tell the jury you are a terrorist before you have to put on any evidence. The fear factor that has emerged since 9/11 has permeated into the U.S. court system in a profoundly disturbing way. It embraces the idea that we can compromise core principles, for example the presumption of innocence, based on perceived threats that may or may not come to light. We, as a society, have chosen to cave on fear.”
I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also wildly overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and political passivity, as well as pump billions of dollars into the hands of the military, private contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive client governments including that of Pakistan. The leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years, just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as emblematic of the entire war on terror.
Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The number of extremists who are planning to carry out terrorist attacks is minuscule, but there are vast departments and legions of ambitious intelligence and military officers who desperately need to strike a tangible blow against terrorism, real or imagined, to promote their careers as well as justify obscene expenditures and a flagrant abuse of power. All this will not make us safer. It will not protect us from terrorist strikes. The more we dispatch brutal forms of power to the Islamic world the more enraged Muslims and terrorists we propel into the ranks of those who oppose us. The same perverted logic saw the Argentine military, when I lived in Buenos Aires, “disappear” 30,000 of the nation’s citizens, the vast majority of whom were innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to root out terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I arrived in 1983, the death squads were killing between 800 and 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of money and invest your political capital in a ruthless war against subversion, once you empower a network of clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you fuel the very insecurity and violence you seek to contain.
I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see. These abuses, justified by the war on terror, have created a system of internal and external state terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic radicals.
AP / Fareed Khan
Mohammad Ahmed, son of Aafia Siddiqui, takes part in a demonstration arranged by Human Rights Network.
OK, so you're new to the case and/or have considered the most intelligent thing to do re. Aafia Siddiqui to be let it go and let our "civilian court" handle things.
Chris Hedges, former journalist for the NYTimes, who's covered many "terrorist" stories, said: "I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see."
Consider his comments soon after Aafia's Jan-Feb Trial this year entitled
"The Terror-Industrial Complex"
The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill American military officers and FBI agents illustrates that the greatest danger to our security comes not from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our government employs around the globe.
The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, 37, who received an undergraduate degree from MIT and a doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University, often defies belief. Siddiqui, who could spend 50 years in prison on seven charges when she is sentenced in May, was by her own account abducted in 2003 from her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with her three children—two of whom remain missing—and spirited to a secret U.S. prison where she was allegedly tortured and mistreated for five years. The American government has no comment, either about the alleged clandestine detention or the missing children.
Siddiqui was discovered in 2008 disoriented and apparently aggressive and hostile, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, with her oldest son. She allegedly was carrying plans to make explosives, lists of New York landmarks and notes referring to “mass-casualty attacks.” But despite these claims the government prosecutors chose not to charge her with terrorism or links to al-Qaida—the reason for her original appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list six years ago. Her supporters suggest that the papers she allegedly had in her possession when she was found in Afghanistan, rather than detail coherent plans for terrorist attacks, expose her severe mental deterioration, perhaps the result of years of imprisonment and abuse. This argument was bolstered by some of the pages of the documents shown briefly to the court, including a crude sketch of a gun that was described as a “match gun” that operates by lighting a match.
“Justice was not served,” Tina Foster, executive director of the International Justice Network and the spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family, told me. “The U.S. government made a decision to label this woman a terrorist, but instead of putting her on trial for the alleged terrorist activity she was put on trial for something else. They tried to convict her of that something else, not with evidence, but because she was a terrorist. She was selectively prosecuted for something that would allow them to only tell their side of the story.”
The government built its entire case instead around disputed events in the 300-square-foot room of the Ghazni police station. It insisted that on July 18, 2008, the diminutive Siddiqui, who had been arrested by local Afghan police the day before, seized an M4 assault rifle that was left unattended and fired at American military and FBI agents. None of the Americans were injured. Siddiqui, however, was gravely wounded, shot twice in the stomach.
No one, other than Siddiqui, has attempted to explain where she was for five years after she vanished in 2003. No one seems to be able to explain why a disoriented Pakistani woman and her son, an American citizen, neither of whom spoke Dari, were discovered by local residents wandering in a public square in Ghazni, where an eyewitness told Harpers Magazine the distraught Siddiqui “was attacking everyone who got close to her.” Had Siddiqui, after years of imprisonment and torture, perhaps been at the U.S. detention center in Bagram and then dumped with one of her three children in Ghazi? And where are the other two children, one of whom also is an American citizen? In an article written by Petra Bartosiewicz in the November 2009 Harper’s Magazine, authorities in Afghanistan described a series of events at odds with the official version.
The events of the following day are also subject to dispute. According to the complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer, two FBI agents, and two military interpreters came to question Siddiqui at Ghazni’s police headquarters. The team was shown to a meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain. “None of the United States personnel were aware,” the complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.” No explanation is offered as to why no one thought to look behind it. The group sat down to talk and, in another odd lapse of vigilance, “the Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.” Siddiqui, like a villain in a stage play, reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain “slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, then fell unconscious.
The authorities in Afghanistan describe a different series of events. The governor of Ghazni Province, Usman Usmani, told my local reporter that the U.S. team had “demanded to take over custody” of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: the U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a “senior Ghazni police officer” suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui, the Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, “thinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.”
Siddiqui’s own version of the shooting is less complicated. As she explained it to a delegation of Pakistani senators who came to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after her arrest, she never touched anyone’s gun, nor did she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted, “She is loose,” and then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness she heard someone else say, “We could lose our jobs.”
Siddiqui’s defense team pointed out that there was an absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4, all of which suggested it had not been fired. They played a video to show that two holes in a wall supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July 18. They also highlighted inconsistencies in the testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at times gave conflicting accounts of how many people were in the room, where they were sitting or standing and how many shots were fired.
Siddiqui, who took the stand during the trial against the advice of her defense team, called the report that she had fired the unattended M4 assault rifle at the Americans “the biggest lie.” She said she had been trying to flee the police station because she feared being tortured. Siddiqui, whose mental stability often appeared to be in question during the trial, was ejected several times from the Manhattan courtroom for erratic behavior and outbursts.
“It is difficult to get a fair trial in this country if the government wants to accuse you of terrorism,” said Foster. “It is difficult to get a fair trial on any types of charges. The government is allowed to tell the jury you are a terrorist before you have to put on any evidence. The fear factor that has emerged since 9/11 has permeated into the U.S. court system in a profoundly disturbing way. It embraces the idea that we can compromise core principles, for example the presumption of innocence, based on perceived threats that may or may not come to light. We, as a society, have chosen to cave on fear.”
I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also wildly overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and political passivity, as well as pump billions of dollars into the hands of the military, private contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive client governments including that of Pakistan. The leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years, just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as emblematic of the entire war on terror.
Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The number of extremists who are planning to carry out terrorist attacks is minuscule, but there are vast departments and legions of ambitious intelligence and military officers who desperately need to strike a tangible blow against terrorism, real or imagined, to promote their careers as well as justify obscene expenditures and a flagrant abuse of power. All this will not make us safer. It will not protect us from terrorist strikes. The more we dispatch brutal forms of power to the Islamic world the more enraged Muslims and terrorists we propel into the ranks of those who oppose us. The same perverted logic saw the Argentine military, when I lived in Buenos Aires, “disappear” 30,000 of the nation’s citizens, the vast majority of whom were innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to root out terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I arrived in 1983, the death squads were killing between 800 and 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of money and invest your political capital in a ruthless war against subversion, once you empower a network of clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you fuel the very insecurity and violence you seek to contain.
I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty. But I do know that permitting jailers, spies, kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the rule of law contaminates us with our own bile. Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do not see. These abuses, justified by the war on terror, have created a system of internal and external state terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic radicals.
Don't Blame the Victim (earlier classic analysis of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui case)
KEY and prophetic excerpts from the analysis below:
"Tables are turning: at the going rate it might not be very long before US finds itself lagging behind developing countries in matters of awareness about human rights among the masses. For its own good, US ought to revise its take on this case."
"The United Nations was a giant step towards peace, but what about “united humanity”? We need to alter certain perceptions now and we need to set new precedents."
Case study
On March 30, 2003, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui disappeared from Karachi along with her three minor children. Media reported that she had been taken by the US authorities with compliance of Pakistani authorities since the FBI had wanted to seek some information from her. In the face of general outcry, the US and Pakistani authorities quickly backtracked but then a year later Pakistani Foreign Office admitted publicly that Aafia had been handed over to the US.1
She became a concern for human rights organizations including Amnesty International who kept the case alive for five years. On July 6, 2008, political party Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf presented a British journalist in Islamabad who said there was reason to believe that Aafia was the “Prisoner 650″ at Bagram (Afghanistan) and had undergone brutal rape and torture for five years. Outcry reaches a high water mark and urgent appeals were sent by Asian Human Rights Commission on July 22, to President George Bush and other persons of authority.
On August 4, the US authorities officially admitted of having Aafia in their custody but the US Department of Justice brought forth a charge sheet against her, claiming that she was arrested on July 17 (and not before) while loitering around near the residence of Ghazni’s Governor. They alleged that papers found in her handbag included instructions on making bombs and notes about installations in US.
They explained her wounds by saying that a day after her arrest she took an M4 rife which belonged to US military personnel and fired two rounds at close range, which missed, and she had to be shot in the torso.
On August 16, the US envoy to Pakistan made a public statement saying that the US had no “definitive knowledge” of the whereabouts of Aafia’s children but only a few days later the Afghan authorities revealed that an 11-year-old boy had also been “arrested” with Aafia and this boy was then repatriated to be received by Aafia’s family as her eldest son.
The story narrated about this alleged episode is not plausible, and contradictions self-evident. Yet Aafia has been suffering pain and humiliation in US prison for more than two months now. There are fears that she is now being brainwashed in order to render her incapable of giving evidence against any atrocities that might have been committed against her.
Three anomalies in the trial
Basically: (a) victim has become the accused; (b) allegations are not being addressed in proper order; and (c) allegations against US authorities by human rights groups and concerned citizens are going un-addressed.
Victim has become the accused
Those who say that they hope to get justice from US legal system in this case are overlooking the fact that the trial is not being held to provide justice to Aafia. It is being held against her.2
Allegations not addressed in proper order
The case involves three allegations, not one. These need to be addressed in the order in which they appeared:
1. The FBI’s declaration that it needed Dr. Aafia Siddiqui for interrogation (2003)
2. Allegations raised by human rights organizations and Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf that Aafia Siddiqui was being illegally detained, raped and tortured by US authorities (with possible compliance of Pakistani authorities) for five years, and that her three minor children were in illegal detention. July 6, 2008 is the high water mark for this allegation.
3. Allegation raised by US authorities against Dr. Aafia Siddiqui that she tried to assassinate US army personnel on July 18, 2008. This allegation was brought forth on August 4, 2008.*
The first of these has not been legally pursued by authorities even after they admitted having custody of Aafia. Hence it may be considered as dropped.
The second allegation, which is against US authorities, has never been answered seriously except for a flat rebuttal in inappropriate and condescending tone (consider the US envoy’s open letter of August 16).
Now the third allegation is being addressed in a court of law without addressing the second. This leads to great confusion. The victim has been given into the custody of the party accused of committing offenses against her, and mandate is given to them to further curtail her liberties as a “high security risk”.
Let’s understand: it’s not as if US Government said that it would rather like to keep Aafia in a rehabilitation center in America for treatment of torments suffered by her during five-year-long illegal detention. The victim is now in custody of the party accused of committing the following atrocities against her:
1. Abduction and illegal detention of the victim
2. Abduction and illegal detention of the victim’s minor children
3. Attempt of coercing the victim to sign false evidence
4. Threatening the victim with murder of her children
5. Sexual abuse, rape and torture
6. Attempted brainwashing
7. Possibly, murder of two of the victim’s minor children **
The first step should have been to ensure that the party accused of committing these offenses didn’t have any further access to her with malevolent intent. The opposite has happened.
Aafia’s transfer from military to civil authorities doesn’t ensure that her abusers have lost influence: responding to journalists’ question about why they didn’t seek bail for Aafia, her lawyer answered, “There’s more in this case than meets the eye.”
What’s going wrong now
Following incidents which can be seen as injustice or malpractice have occurred after August 6, when Aafia was first presented in New York:
1. Victim was remanded on implausible charges4
2. Bail was not even sought by her lawyers5
3. US envoy gave a questionable statement about victim’s children6
4. It’s possible that the victim’s eldest son was brainwashed before being handed over by Afghan authorities7
5. Motion to establish the victim as mentally unfit to stand trial, if accepted, will disqualify her from giving evidence later against her abusers
6. At Carswell, the victim can be at risk of being brainwashed or rendered incapable of providing evidence
Two children of the victim are still missing. If they are still alive then it is possible that they are being used as hostages to pressurize her. Allegations of her illegal detention, rape, etc, and the abduction of her children, is going unaddressed.
Can she get justice from US legal system?
That question will arise only after a case is brought up to seek justice for her. The current trial has been registered against the victim and not against her abusers.
Unfounded speculation is bad but some speculation is required for arriving anywhere in legal matters. Here we are forced to choose between two options: either the story about Aafia’s alleged arrest and shooting as told by the DOJ is true, or it is false.
The story is not likely to be true. Consider this passage from rejoinder to US envoy’s letter by Kamran Shafi, journalist and former trainer in small arms:
By the way Excellency, if you care to notice, Aafia Siddiqui is about your build and dimensions. May I suggest you get one of your Marines at the embassy to bring you a US army-issue M4 rifle. Now ask him to clear the chamber, affix the magazine, put the rifle on ‘safe’, and place it on the ground which would be the exact position in which Aafia Siddiqui found hers and with which she is alleged to have fired upon the US officer. You may very well fail to even cock it in 10 seconds, let alone find the safety catch, lift the rifle to your shoulder and fire it.8
It seems as if the US authorities knew that this story won’t stand a test in the court and their real strategy was to buy time for declaring Aafia mentally unfit or perhaps even to induce mental disorder while in custody.
Such speculation sounds harsh but once the DOJ story is rejected there is no way we can pass over it as an “honest mistake”. If the story is false then obviously we aredealing with an unusually ugly and disturbing cover-up of enormous dimensions.
We must not forget the three other victims in this case: Aafia’s minor children. The first is Ahmad Siddiqui, 11-year-old, and the anomalies in his case raise suspicions of a three-step approach to cover up brainwashing in captivity.9 First, deny having any “definitive knowledge” of the captive’s whereabouts. Second, admit that he was in detention even at the time of those denials. Third, send him home in mentally unstable state where he cannot recall details about captivity. There is a stark analogy between his fate and the contradictory reports now coming out about her mother: is she at step 2 now, undergoing brainwashing?
By the authorities’ own admission Ahmad’s detention at least from July 17 to August 22 was irregular: it was covered up despite urgent appeals from around the world.
The second victim is Aafia’s daughter Mariam, 10 years old (5 at the time of her disappearance), and the third is the youngest son Salman, 5 years old (six months at the time of his disappearance). Authorities deny having “definitive knowledge” of his whereabouts too.
It may be remembered that capture of minor children and infants for pressurizing their parents was described by Pakistan’s former president Pervez Muharraf as fair tactic while participating in American War Against Terror.10
What needs to be done
We need to be absolutely clear that the real issue here is the second set of allegations in which Aafia is victim, not accused.
By remaining silent on that issue now, the whole world is allowing a victim to become accused. Since this has already become one of the most famous trials of the new century, a bad precedent in this matter is likely to affect the future of human rights for very long time and almost everywhere in the world. Time is of essence here, because it seems as if evidence is being destroyed very fast.
The following steps may need to be taken without losing any further time:
1. Human rights groups in US should file petition in a US court to the effect that Aafia’s trial is unfair and should be dismissed. It needs to be dismissed immediately, and in any case latest by November 7, i.e. forty days before the date which has been set for hearing whether or not Aafia is mentally fit to stand trial: there is reason to suspect that some foul play is going on which is likely to accomplish its ends by that date and evidence related to actual culprits will have been destroyed, possibly including memory of the victim herself.
2. Separately, a complaint should be lodged against culprits who victimized Aafia earlier, and a plea should be made for the recovery of her two missing children.
3. All peaceful and healthy means should be used for educating people in as many countries as possible about the AAFIA issue – especially the message that a victim should not be victimized and the meaning of justice should not be distorted.11
4. Concerned citizens of the world need to explore whether there is a proper channel for taking up this issue beyond slogans, protests and demonstrations. If no such channel exists then it needs to be created.
5. If any rights group decides to make a separate committee for pursuing this case, then that committee should also look into the wider implications and related issues, and hence “AAFIA” might be a good acronym for “Affirmative Action for the Freedom and Independence of All” (Aafia literally means comprehensive safety). Fresh grounds need to be broken for safeguarding human rights in these new times.
United Nations was a giant step towards peace, but what about “united humanity”? We need to alter certain perceptions now and we need to set new precedents.
Consequences for everyone
Terrorism is a serious threat which should not be trivialized the way it has been through the victimization of Aafia Siddiqui and her minor children. Genuine efforts being made against terrorism will also earn a bad name, if not fall flat on their face, if moral superiority is lost – and it will be lost if injustice in the case of Aafia Siddiqui completes its course.
The case is so complex, and its details so gruesome, that many still may not have realized what the possible outcome of her mistreatment might turn out to be. The analysis offered here may not be how everyone is seeing things now but it is likely to be how these things will be seen in times to come, as the truth gradually seeps into people’s conscience.
Then a great setback for human rights may be suffered because in our times such rights rest on the premise that people are entities who should be respected, their humanity cannot be usurped by any government and a person cannot be objectified before the mystique of state. Losing this one case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui can mean losing the very premise of human rights, and losing it in bright limelight.12
It is not just about Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, but rather ironically, it is also about what her first name means literally in her native language: comprehensive safety. She is a highly educated woman who made it to the upper strata of middle class in two societies – Pakistan and US. What happened to her can happen to anyone, and it may happen more easily in future if bad precedent is set now.
For America, it is a moment of truth. The international community has been hearing so much about the “deposed” Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry, who used to take suo moto action on such cases, forcing his government and its much-dread intelligence agencies to become answerable to the court. For that he risked his job, personal freedom and the future of his children. Global observers are likely to notice that no judge in US seems to be as willing to take suo moto action in this case as Justice Chaudhry of Pakistan would have been even if such thing had been found in his jurisdiction. Tables are turning: at the going rate it might not be very long before US finds itself lagging behind developing countries in matters of awareness about human rights among the masses. For its own good, US ought to revise its take on this case.
REFERENCES
1 Her children were not mentioned by FO, but President Musharraf later dropped hint in his autobiography that “arresting” minors and even infant children of accused was part of tactics being used in the US War Against Terror.
2 In the case of rape, the term “victim” is applied to the aggrieved party even before her case is proven true in a court.
3 I am presuming that the first allegation has already been dropped by the party which raised it, so we need not address it anymore. In all fairness, we should be open to give it due importance, with proper attention to the whole context, in case the first party (i.e. the FBI) chooses to bring it back in the future.
4 Charge sheet against Aafia was implausible and inaccuracies could have been exposed through a simple simulation/demonstration. Yet the American judge gave remand of her person instead of sending her to a hospital as she deserved in view of her condition (she was still bleeding from bullet wounds)
5 Why should seeking bail be so difficult in a case where the accusation doesn’t pass the test of common sense, let alone legal proceeding? More importantly, why was bail not even sought?
6 On August 16, the US envoy to Pakistan stated publicly that the US authorities have no definitive knowledge of the whereabouts of Aafia’s children. About ten days later the Afghan authorities stated that they had also “arrested” a boy along with Aafia. One could smell a rat here: a person of such prominence as US envoy is unlikely to risk a misleading statement unless the stakes are really high.
7 Aafia’s son, finally repatriated by Afghan authorities, cannot recall much and is having nightmares. Did the authorities deny knowledge of his whereabouts initially because at that time they were brainwashing him and were still unsure that it would work?
8 Published in Dawn (Karachi) on October 14. Earlier on September 10, Joane Mariner, an attorney with Human Rights Watch in New York wrote in Counterpunch, “If you trust the US story, you have to imagine that… more than the al Qaeda mom, as the New York Post dubs her, she would have to be al Qaeda’s Angelina Jolie.”
9 The word “definitive knowledge” in US envoy’s statement leaves an uncomfortable impression of preparing for a future moment when it may turn out to be otherwise and then it could be said that the knowledge which the US authorities had in this matter was not “definitive” but of some other sort (The statement said, “The United States has no definitive knowledge as to the whereabouts of Ms Siddiqui’s children”). Was Ahmad being subjected to brainwashing so that his detention could not be revealed till making sure that the process had been successful?
10 In the Line of Fire: A Memoir by Pervez Musharraf published in 2006 by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, p.224.***
11 In Pakistan and Islamic countries this case study can be specially useful: given the peculiar nature of this case, the masses are likely to accept the message and apply it to other injustices against the weak.
12 In Pakistan, even now the HRCP might be facing a crisis about its credibility with the masses, who generally feel that the HRCP has done less than what was expected of it in this regards.
This analysis is the work of Khurram Ali Shafique: a prolific writer/journalist; an award-winning biographer; and an historian who's pen covers a wide circle of time and geography.
For one earlier posting GO here
"Tables are turning: at the going rate it might not be very long before US finds itself lagging behind developing countries in matters of awareness about human rights among the masses. For its own good, US ought to revise its take on this case."
"The United Nations was a giant step towards peace, but what about “united humanity”? We need to alter certain perceptions now and we need to set new precedents."
Case study
On March 30, 2003, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui disappeared from Karachi along with her three minor children. Media reported that she had been taken by the US authorities with compliance of Pakistani authorities since the FBI had wanted to seek some information from her. In the face of general outcry, the US and Pakistani authorities quickly backtracked but then a year later Pakistani Foreign Office admitted publicly that Aafia had been handed over to the US.1
She became a concern for human rights organizations including Amnesty International who kept the case alive for five years. On July 6, 2008, political party Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf presented a British journalist in Islamabad who said there was reason to believe that Aafia was the “Prisoner 650″ at Bagram (Afghanistan) and had undergone brutal rape and torture for five years. Outcry reaches a high water mark and urgent appeals were sent by Asian Human Rights Commission on July 22, to President George Bush and other persons of authority.
On August 4, the US authorities officially admitted of having Aafia in their custody but the US Department of Justice brought forth a charge sheet against her, claiming that she was arrested on July 17 (and not before) while loitering around near the residence of Ghazni’s Governor. They alleged that papers found in her handbag included instructions on making bombs and notes about installations in US.
They explained her wounds by saying that a day after her arrest she took an M4 rife which belonged to US military personnel and fired two rounds at close range, which missed, and she had to be shot in the torso.
On August 16, the US envoy to Pakistan made a public statement saying that the US had no “definitive knowledge” of the whereabouts of Aafia’s children but only a few days later the Afghan authorities revealed that an 11-year-old boy had also been “arrested” with Aafia and this boy was then repatriated to be received by Aafia’s family as her eldest son.
The story narrated about this alleged episode is not plausible, and contradictions self-evident. Yet Aafia has been suffering pain and humiliation in US prison for more than two months now. There are fears that she is now being brainwashed in order to render her incapable of giving evidence against any atrocities that might have been committed against her.
Three anomalies in the trial
Basically: (a) victim has become the accused; (b) allegations are not being addressed in proper order; and (c) allegations against US authorities by human rights groups and concerned citizens are going un-addressed.
Victim has become the accused
Those who say that they hope to get justice from US legal system in this case are overlooking the fact that the trial is not being held to provide justice to Aafia. It is being held against her.2
Allegations not addressed in proper order
The case involves three allegations, not one. These need to be addressed in the order in which they appeared:
1. The FBI’s declaration that it needed Dr. Aafia Siddiqui for interrogation (2003)
2. Allegations raised by human rights organizations and Pakistan Tehrik-i-Insaf that Aafia Siddiqui was being illegally detained, raped and tortured by US authorities (with possible compliance of Pakistani authorities) for five years, and that her three minor children were in illegal detention. July 6, 2008 is the high water mark for this allegation.
3. Allegation raised by US authorities against Dr. Aafia Siddiqui that she tried to assassinate US army personnel on July 18, 2008. This allegation was brought forth on August 4, 2008.*
The first of these has not been legally pursued by authorities even after they admitted having custody of Aafia. Hence it may be considered as dropped.
The second allegation, which is against US authorities, has never been answered seriously except for a flat rebuttal in inappropriate and condescending tone (consider the US envoy’s open letter of August 16).
Now the third allegation is being addressed in a court of law without addressing the second. This leads to great confusion. The victim has been given into the custody of the party accused of committing offenses against her, and mandate is given to them to further curtail her liberties as a “high security risk”.
Let’s understand: it’s not as if US Government said that it would rather like to keep Aafia in a rehabilitation center in America for treatment of torments suffered by her during five-year-long illegal detention. The victim is now in custody of the party accused of committing the following atrocities against her:
1. Abduction and illegal detention of the victim
2. Abduction and illegal detention of the victim’s minor children
3. Attempt of coercing the victim to sign false evidence
4. Threatening the victim with murder of her children
5. Sexual abuse, rape and torture
6. Attempted brainwashing
7. Possibly, murder of two of the victim’s minor children **
The first step should have been to ensure that the party accused of committing these offenses didn’t have any further access to her with malevolent intent. The opposite has happened.
Aafia’s transfer from military to civil authorities doesn’t ensure that her abusers have lost influence: responding to journalists’ question about why they didn’t seek bail for Aafia, her lawyer answered, “There’s more in this case than meets the eye.”
What’s going wrong now
Following incidents which can be seen as injustice or malpractice have occurred after August 6, when Aafia was first presented in New York:
1. Victim was remanded on implausible charges4
2. Bail was not even sought by her lawyers5
3. US envoy gave a questionable statement about victim’s children6
4. It’s possible that the victim’s eldest son was brainwashed before being handed over by Afghan authorities7
5. Motion to establish the victim as mentally unfit to stand trial, if accepted, will disqualify her from giving evidence later against her abusers
6. At Carswell, the victim can be at risk of being brainwashed or rendered incapable of providing evidence
Two children of the victim are still missing. If they are still alive then it is possible that they are being used as hostages to pressurize her. Allegations of her illegal detention, rape, etc, and the abduction of her children, is going unaddressed.
Can she get justice from US legal system?
That question will arise only after a case is brought up to seek justice for her. The current trial has been registered against the victim and not against her abusers.
Unfounded speculation is bad but some speculation is required for arriving anywhere in legal matters. Here we are forced to choose between two options: either the story about Aafia’s alleged arrest and shooting as told by the DOJ is true, or it is false.
The story is not likely to be true. Consider this passage from rejoinder to US envoy’s letter by Kamran Shafi, journalist and former trainer in small arms:
By the way Excellency, if you care to notice, Aafia Siddiqui is about your build and dimensions. May I suggest you get one of your Marines at the embassy to bring you a US army-issue M4 rifle. Now ask him to clear the chamber, affix the magazine, put the rifle on ‘safe’, and place it on the ground which would be the exact position in which Aafia Siddiqui found hers and with which she is alleged to have fired upon the US officer. You may very well fail to even cock it in 10 seconds, let alone find the safety catch, lift the rifle to your shoulder and fire it.8
It seems as if the US authorities knew that this story won’t stand a test in the court and their real strategy was to buy time for declaring Aafia mentally unfit or perhaps even to induce mental disorder while in custody.
Such speculation sounds harsh but once the DOJ story is rejected there is no way we can pass over it as an “honest mistake”. If the story is false then obviously we aredealing with an unusually ugly and disturbing cover-up of enormous dimensions.
We must not forget the three other victims in this case: Aafia’s minor children. The first is Ahmad Siddiqui, 11-year-old, and the anomalies in his case raise suspicions of a three-step approach to cover up brainwashing in captivity.9 First, deny having any “definitive knowledge” of the captive’s whereabouts. Second, admit that he was in detention even at the time of those denials. Third, send him home in mentally unstable state where he cannot recall details about captivity. There is a stark analogy between his fate and the contradictory reports now coming out about her mother: is she at step 2 now, undergoing brainwashing?
By the authorities’ own admission Ahmad’s detention at least from July 17 to August 22 was irregular: it was covered up despite urgent appeals from around the world.
The second victim is Aafia’s daughter Mariam, 10 years old (5 at the time of her disappearance), and the third is the youngest son Salman, 5 years old (six months at the time of his disappearance). Authorities deny having “definitive knowledge” of his whereabouts too.
It may be remembered that capture of minor children and infants for pressurizing their parents was described by Pakistan’s former president Pervez Muharraf as fair tactic while participating in American War Against Terror.10
What needs to be done
We need to be absolutely clear that the real issue here is the second set of allegations in which Aafia is victim, not accused.
By remaining silent on that issue now, the whole world is allowing a victim to become accused. Since this has already become one of the most famous trials of the new century, a bad precedent in this matter is likely to affect the future of human rights for very long time and almost everywhere in the world. Time is of essence here, because it seems as if evidence is being destroyed very fast.
The following steps may need to be taken without losing any further time:
1. Human rights groups in US should file petition in a US court to the effect that Aafia’s trial is unfair and should be dismissed. It needs to be dismissed immediately, and in any case latest by November 7, i.e. forty days before the date which has been set for hearing whether or not Aafia is mentally fit to stand trial: there is reason to suspect that some foul play is going on which is likely to accomplish its ends by that date and evidence related to actual culprits will have been destroyed, possibly including memory of the victim herself.
2. Separately, a complaint should be lodged against culprits who victimized Aafia earlier, and a plea should be made for the recovery of her two missing children.
3. All peaceful and healthy means should be used for educating people in as many countries as possible about the AAFIA issue – especially the message that a victim should not be victimized and the meaning of justice should not be distorted.11
4. Concerned citizens of the world need to explore whether there is a proper channel for taking up this issue beyond slogans, protests and demonstrations. If no such channel exists then it needs to be created.
5. If any rights group decides to make a separate committee for pursuing this case, then that committee should also look into the wider implications and related issues, and hence “AAFIA” might be a good acronym for “Affirmative Action for the Freedom and Independence of All” (Aafia literally means comprehensive safety). Fresh grounds need to be broken for safeguarding human rights in these new times.
United Nations was a giant step towards peace, but what about “united humanity”? We need to alter certain perceptions now and we need to set new precedents.
Consequences for everyone
Terrorism is a serious threat which should not be trivialized the way it has been through the victimization of Aafia Siddiqui and her minor children. Genuine efforts being made against terrorism will also earn a bad name, if not fall flat on their face, if moral superiority is lost – and it will be lost if injustice in the case of Aafia Siddiqui completes its course.
The case is so complex, and its details so gruesome, that many still may not have realized what the possible outcome of her mistreatment might turn out to be. The analysis offered here may not be how everyone is seeing things now but it is likely to be how these things will be seen in times to come, as the truth gradually seeps into people’s conscience.
Then a great setback for human rights may be suffered because in our times such rights rest on the premise that people are entities who should be respected, their humanity cannot be usurped by any government and a person cannot be objectified before the mystique of state. Losing this one case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui can mean losing the very premise of human rights, and losing it in bright limelight.12
It is not just about Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, but rather ironically, it is also about what her first name means literally in her native language: comprehensive safety. She is a highly educated woman who made it to the upper strata of middle class in two societies – Pakistan and US. What happened to her can happen to anyone, and it may happen more easily in future if bad precedent is set now.
For America, it is a moment of truth. The international community has been hearing so much about the “deposed” Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Chaudhry, who used to take suo moto action on such cases, forcing his government and its much-dread intelligence agencies to become answerable to the court. For that he risked his job, personal freedom and the future of his children. Global observers are likely to notice that no judge in US seems to be as willing to take suo moto action in this case as Justice Chaudhry of Pakistan would have been even if such thing had been found in his jurisdiction. Tables are turning: at the going rate it might not be very long before US finds itself lagging behind developing countries in matters of awareness about human rights among the masses. For its own good, US ought to revise its take on this case.
REFERENCES
1 Her children were not mentioned by FO, but President Musharraf later dropped hint in his autobiography that “arresting” minors and even infant children of accused was part of tactics being used in the US War Against Terror.
2 In the case of rape, the term “victim” is applied to the aggrieved party even before her case is proven true in a court.
3 I am presuming that the first allegation has already been dropped by the party which raised it, so we need not address it anymore. In all fairness, we should be open to give it due importance, with proper attention to the whole context, in case the first party (i.e. the FBI) chooses to bring it back in the future.
4 Charge sheet against Aafia was implausible and inaccuracies could have been exposed through a simple simulation/demonstration. Yet the American judge gave remand of her person instead of sending her to a hospital as she deserved in view of her condition (she was still bleeding from bullet wounds)
5 Why should seeking bail be so difficult in a case where the accusation doesn’t pass the test of common sense, let alone legal proceeding? More importantly, why was bail not even sought?
6 On August 16, the US envoy to Pakistan stated publicly that the US authorities have no definitive knowledge of the whereabouts of Aafia’s children. About ten days later the Afghan authorities stated that they had also “arrested” a boy along with Aafia. One could smell a rat here: a person of such prominence as US envoy is unlikely to risk a misleading statement unless the stakes are really high.
7 Aafia’s son, finally repatriated by Afghan authorities, cannot recall much and is having nightmares. Did the authorities deny knowledge of his whereabouts initially because at that time they were brainwashing him and were still unsure that it would work?
8 Published in Dawn (Karachi) on October 14. Earlier on September 10, Joane Mariner, an attorney with Human Rights Watch in New York wrote in Counterpunch, “If you trust the US story, you have to imagine that… more than the al Qaeda mom, as the New York Post dubs her, she would have to be al Qaeda’s Angelina Jolie.”
9 The word “definitive knowledge” in US envoy’s statement leaves an uncomfortable impression of preparing for a future moment when it may turn out to be otherwise and then it could be said that the knowledge which the US authorities had in this matter was not “definitive” but of some other sort (The statement said, “The United States has no definitive knowledge as to the whereabouts of Ms Siddiqui’s children”). Was Ahmad being subjected to brainwashing so that his detention could not be revealed till making sure that the process had been successful?
10 In the Line of Fire: A Memoir by Pervez Musharraf published in 2006 by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, p.224.***
11 In Pakistan and Islamic countries this case study can be specially useful: given the peculiar nature of this case, the masses are likely to accept the message and apply it to other injustices against the weak.
12 In Pakistan, even now the HRCP might be facing a crisis about its credibility with the masses, who generally feel that the HRCP has done less than what was expected of it in this regards.
This analysis is the work of Khurram Ali Shafique: a prolific writer/journalist; an award-winning biographer; and an historian who's pen covers a wide circle of time and geography.
For one earlier posting GO here
PM Pakistan urged taking immediate action for Aafia release
PM urged taking immediate action for Aafia release
By PPI 9 hours 7 minutes ago
KARACHI: “Solicitor said four months ago that Dr. Aafia can be repatriated to Pakistan within 72 hours if the Pakistani government officially appeals United States government, and only one day is left to take this action”.
This was said by Dr Asmat Siddiqui, the mother of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui in a press conference at his residence, here on Tuesday. She said that case against Dr. Aafia is false and baseless while the US government is seeking for political solution of this case and she can be released easily before court announces sentence, simply through an official request by Pakistani government as grant of remission in present in US law in this regard. She said that they are very thankful to Rehman Malik for his effective role in (requesting) release of Dr. Aafia’s children but an official letter with the signature of Prime Minister or President of Pakistan is necessary for withdrawal of cases and release of Dr. Aafia. Dr. Asmat Siddiqui said,
“I have many complaints to both the government and opposition and I request them to please understand the sensitivity of problem.” She said this is not just the matter of release of my daughter but of dignity of entire nation. She said our youth are already very emotional in this regard, and no one will be able to control them if the US court sentenced Dr Aafia. Only a sympathetic person can feel our pains, she added...She concluded that the government should realize...who will be held responsible in the court of Allah for miseries of Dr. Aafia.
See this news blurb here
Posted by Connie L. Nash at 3:33 PM
By PPI 9 hours 7 minutes ago
KARACHI: “Solicitor said four months ago that Dr. Aafia can be repatriated to Pakistan within 72 hours if the Pakistani government officially appeals United States government, and only one day is left to take this action”.
This was said by Dr Asmat Siddiqui, the mother of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui in a press conference at his residence, here on Tuesday. She said that case against Dr. Aafia is false and baseless while the US government is seeking for political solution of this case and she can be released easily before court announces sentence, simply through an official request by Pakistani government as grant of remission in present in US law in this regard. She said that they are very thankful to Rehman Malik for his effective role in (requesting) release of Dr. Aafia’s children but an official letter with the signature of Prime Minister or President of Pakistan is necessary for withdrawal of cases and release of Dr. Aafia. Dr. Asmat Siddiqui said,
“I have many complaints to both the government and opposition and I request them to please understand the sensitivity of problem.” She said this is not just the matter of release of my daughter but of dignity of entire nation. She said our youth are already very emotional in this regard, and no one will be able to control them if the US court sentenced Dr Aafia. Only a sympathetic person can feel our pains, she added...She concluded that the government should realize...who will be held responsible in the court of Allah for miseries of Dr. Aafia.
See this news blurb here
Posted by Connie L. Nash at 3:33 PM
Pakistani-Americans Must Condemn Times Square Adventurism
Pakistani-Americans Must Condemn Times Square Adventurism
Posted on 04 May 2010 by Ibrahim Sajid Malick
Like an exogenous bad news that suddenly stunts the market and everyone – no matter how risk averse, above board they may have been – are negatively impacted – every Pakistani-American felt a ton of bricks when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that an individual from their community may have driven an explosive laden SUV to Times Square.
Among many aspects that I admire about my new ‘homeland’ one that is most precious is the justice system. I understand Faisal Shahzad’s presumption of innocence and I am sure when he has his day in the court he will be afforded that right. I am hoping he can miraculously explain why he bought a SUV and paid cash for it, how did his SUV showed up in the middle of Times Square with explosives and why he was going to Dubai and not Pakistan?
But candidly speaking – that is my wishful thinking.
For a minute, let’s assume that Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American who lived in Connecticut was indeed the individual who attempted to wreak havoc and harm innocent people. What than should we do? We, the hyphenated Pakistanis who have made this country our own- how do we purge our communities from poisonous, misguided individuals?
I feel there is larger and more complex question that plagues us but we are not the first immigrant community to face this challenge.
In the post 9/11 world the key issue around which debate, hopes, and hostilities often crystallizes is religion. Religion has become an emblem of cultural and personal identity for many. I believe ‘Pakistan’ as a nation state does not have such an animosity that an individual of Pakistani descent will risk their own life and attempt such a heinous plot.
And, I want to stress that because pre 9/11 I didn’t find that many young men and women in New York with accentuated religious identity. Heck – I was a young man not long ago and the only person I knew somewhat religious left America after completing his residency. He realized that with his world view he was better off living in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
Bill Maher is right: Secular values are non-negotiable
Those who migrated to this country in search of a secular society (trust me there are plenty of Pakistani atheist and agnostics in New York as well) find themselves in rather vulnerable situation. And, majority who consider religion their personal matter also find themselves under microscope. But that is the exogenous bad news impact – even when you are not responsible your equity shrinks. Tough luck!
Last week Bill Maher said something very interesting:
“Although America likes to think it’s #1, we have to admit we’re behind the developing world in at least one thing: Their religious wackos are a lot more wacko than ours. When “South Park” got threatened last week by Islamists incensed at their depiction of Mohammed, it served—or should—as a reminder to all of us that our culture isn’t just different than one that makes death threats to cartoonists. It’s better.”
I totally agree and that is one of the main reasons why I am at home in East Village, New York. Problem arises when Bill Maher says “their religious wackos” many with Muslim names and backgrounds are unsure if they are part of “their” or “ours.”
I know this binary is rather linear and their can be a horizontal way of looking at cultural community as well.
Talking about Indian writers in England, Salman Rushdie suggested these individuals who are neither completely English nor 100 percent Indians have “access to a second tradition.” And he argues that this tradition is one of cross-connections, not roots. He writes: “the cultural and political history of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group,” constitutes its own community “cross- and intraculturally.”
If we agree with Rushdie and locate ourselves in the “cross-connected” community and do not assign much value to the “roots”, it becomes much easier to grasp and respond to the post 9/11 identity crisis that has put many young men behind beard and young women behind veil.
The politics of identity is a constant process of negotiation. I have written earlier that identity is fluid and contextual. I am a Pakistani when someone in New York asks me ‘where are you from?’ When the same question is posed in Lahore, I am from Karachi. I am a ‘man’ when around women- I am a ‘straight man’ around gays and an ‘old man’ around young kids. This relationality – different agenda joined within the same contested historical space – is central to the concept of identity.
Trust me – I did not digress. I wanted to make sure we are on the page and we define ourselves as hyphenated or “cross-connected”, and if we have made this land our home – we must categorically and unequivocally condemn this misguided individual.
And, we must stay on high alert. Remember those five men from Washington DC, Virginia areas were nabbed in Pakistan because their family and community pro-actively sought solution. If someone was keeping an eye on Faisal Shahzad, we may have averted this too.
We should keep an eye on every individual who we suspect of becoming a religious wacko. We should discourage our young men and women from accentuating only one aspect of their identity – that is “religion.” We should absolutely remind them that “secular values of America are non-negotiabl
Posted on 04 May 2010 by Ibrahim Sajid Malick
Like an exogenous bad news that suddenly stunts the market and everyone – no matter how risk averse, above board they may have been – are negatively impacted – every Pakistani-American felt a ton of bricks when Attorney General Eric Holder announced that an individual from their community may have driven an explosive laden SUV to Times Square.
Among many aspects that I admire about my new ‘homeland’ one that is most precious is the justice system. I understand Faisal Shahzad’s presumption of innocence and I am sure when he has his day in the court he will be afforded that right. I am hoping he can miraculously explain why he bought a SUV and paid cash for it, how did his SUV showed up in the middle of Times Square with explosives and why he was going to Dubai and not Pakistan?
But candidly speaking – that is my wishful thinking.
For a minute, let’s assume that Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American who lived in Connecticut was indeed the individual who attempted to wreak havoc and harm innocent people. What than should we do? We, the hyphenated Pakistanis who have made this country our own- how do we purge our communities from poisonous, misguided individuals?
I feel there is larger and more complex question that plagues us but we are not the first immigrant community to face this challenge.
In the post 9/11 world the key issue around which debate, hopes, and hostilities often crystallizes is religion. Religion has become an emblem of cultural and personal identity for many. I believe ‘Pakistan’ as a nation state does not have such an animosity that an individual of Pakistani descent will risk their own life and attempt such a heinous plot.
And, I want to stress that because pre 9/11 I didn’t find that many young men and women in New York with accentuated religious identity. Heck – I was a young man not long ago and the only person I knew somewhat religious left America after completing his residency. He realized that with his world view he was better off living in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
Bill Maher is right: Secular values are non-negotiable
Those who migrated to this country in search of a secular society (trust me there are plenty of Pakistani atheist and agnostics in New York as well) find themselves in rather vulnerable situation. And, majority who consider religion their personal matter also find themselves under microscope. But that is the exogenous bad news impact – even when you are not responsible your equity shrinks. Tough luck!
Last week Bill Maher said something very interesting:
“Although America likes to think it’s #1, we have to admit we’re behind the developing world in at least one thing: Their religious wackos are a lot more wacko than ours. When “South Park” got threatened last week by Islamists incensed at their depiction of Mohammed, it served—or should—as a reminder to all of us that our culture isn’t just different than one that makes death threats to cartoonists. It’s better.”
I totally agree and that is one of the main reasons why I am at home in East Village, New York. Problem arises when Bill Maher says “their religious wackos” many with Muslim names and backgrounds are unsure if they are part of “their” or “ours.”
I know this binary is rather linear and their can be a horizontal way of looking at cultural community as well.
Talking about Indian writers in England, Salman Rushdie suggested these individuals who are neither completely English nor 100 percent Indians have “access to a second tradition.” And he argues that this tradition is one of cross-connections, not roots. He writes: “the cultural and political history of the phenomenon of migration, displacement, life in a minority group,” constitutes its own community “cross- and intraculturally.”
If we agree with Rushdie and locate ourselves in the “cross-connected” community and do not assign much value to the “roots”, it becomes much easier to grasp and respond to the post 9/11 identity crisis that has put many young men behind beard and young women behind veil.
The politics of identity is a constant process of negotiation. I have written earlier that identity is fluid and contextual. I am a Pakistani when someone in New York asks me ‘where are you from?’ When the same question is posed in Lahore, I am from Karachi. I am a ‘man’ when around women- I am a ‘straight man’ around gays and an ‘old man’ around young kids. This relationality – different agenda joined within the same contested historical space – is central to the concept of identity.
Trust me – I did not digress. I wanted to make sure we are on the page and we define ourselves as hyphenated or “cross-connected”, and if we have made this land our home – we must categorically and unequivocally condemn this misguided individual.
And, we must stay on high alert. Remember those five men from Washington DC, Virginia areas were nabbed in Pakistan because their family and community pro-actively sought solution. If someone was keeping an eye on Faisal Shahzad, we may have averted this too.
We should keep an eye on every individual who we suspect of becoming a religious wacko. We should discourage our young men and women from accentuating only one aspect of their identity – that is “religion.” We should absolutely remind them that “secular values of America are non-negotiabl
is Pakistan Army Anti-America? Not really….
Is Pakistan Army Anti-America? Not really….
Posted on 26 November 2009 by Ibrahim Sajid Malick
When I advocate reform in Pakistan’s power structure or express hope that democracy will soon hold sway in Pakistan, my critics often label me an ‘American agent.’ Many young Pakistanis also opine that questioning ISI’s role is tantamount to compromising the country’s sovereignty.
Taking a look back at Pakistan’s history, however, exposes the hypocrisy of such assertions. It was, in fact, during Gen.Zia ul Haq’s rule that the US was allowed to construct five ‘intelligence and recon basses’ in Pakistan. It was under Gen. Musharaf’s rule that Pakistan compromised the security of it’s nuclear assets, allowed drone attacks, handed over Pakistani civilians to the CIA and allowed Blackwater to launch covert operations.
By now we all know about Seymour Hersh article in New Yorker. I have been wary of Mr. Hersch’s unnamed sources and questioned timing of his stories.
But Jeremy Scahill who writes for The Nation Magazine is a straight shooter. In his latest article in The Nation journalist Jeremy Scahill has revealed that Blackwater is secretly operating in Pakistan under a covert program that includes planning the assassination and kidnapping of Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects. Blackwater is also said to be involved in a previously undisclosed U.S. military drone campaign that has killed scores of people inside Pakistan. Blackwater operatives have been working under a covert program run by the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s top covert operations force. The previously undisclosed JSOC operations would mark the first known confirmation of U.S. military activity inside Pakistan.
This was possible because in 2006 Gen. Pervez Musharaf struck a deal with the Bush administration that allows U.S. Special Operations forces from the Joint Special Operations Command to enter Pakistan with the understanding that they were, “following the target.”
Indeed, if you read Pakistan’s short history you will find that our Army has always served America’s interest and its foreign policy has been congruent with US policy in the region. Although our nation’s key decision to stand in America’s camp pre-dates the Ayub regime, it was during our first martial law that Pakistan’s anti-imperialist forces were completely crushed.
America was the clear winner when, on April 17th 1953, Pakistan’s third Governor General Malik Ghulam Mohammad dismissed Prime Minister Khawaja Nazimuddin who had then enjoyed the confidence of the parliament. Mohammad Ali Bogra was appointed to form a government the same day. Looking through declassified documents at the US National Archives you will understand that the main benefactors of the change were always two elements, Pakistan’s army and the US.
Please see blow the US ambassador’s telegram from the embassy in Karachi sent on April 18th, 1953
Posted on 26 November 2009 by Ibrahim Sajid Malick
When I advocate reform in Pakistan’s power structure or express hope that democracy will soon hold sway in Pakistan, my critics often label me an ‘American agent.’ Many young Pakistanis also opine that questioning ISI’s role is tantamount to compromising the country’s sovereignty.
Taking a look back at Pakistan’s history, however, exposes the hypocrisy of such assertions. It was, in fact, during Gen.Zia ul Haq’s rule that the US was allowed to construct five ‘intelligence and recon basses’ in Pakistan. It was under Gen. Musharaf’s rule that Pakistan compromised the security of it’s nuclear assets, allowed drone attacks, handed over Pakistani civilians to the CIA and allowed Blackwater to launch covert operations.
By now we all know about Seymour Hersh article in New Yorker. I have been wary of Mr. Hersch’s unnamed sources and questioned timing of his stories.
But Jeremy Scahill who writes for The Nation Magazine is a straight shooter. In his latest article in The Nation journalist Jeremy Scahill has revealed that Blackwater is secretly operating in Pakistan under a covert program that includes planning the assassination and kidnapping of Taliban and Al Qaeda suspects. Blackwater is also said to be involved in a previously undisclosed U.S. military drone campaign that has killed scores of people inside Pakistan. Blackwater operatives have been working under a covert program run by the Joint Special Operations Command, the military’s top covert operations force. The previously undisclosed JSOC operations would mark the first known confirmation of U.S. military activity inside Pakistan.
This was possible because in 2006 Gen. Pervez Musharaf struck a deal with the Bush administration that allows U.S. Special Operations forces from the Joint Special Operations Command to enter Pakistan with the understanding that they were, “following the target.”
Indeed, if you read Pakistan’s short history you will find that our Army has always served America’s interest and its foreign policy has been congruent with US policy in the region. Although our nation’s key decision to stand in America’s camp pre-dates the Ayub regime, it was during our first martial law that Pakistan’s anti-imperialist forces were completely crushed.
America was the clear winner when, on April 17th 1953, Pakistan’s third Governor General Malik Ghulam Mohammad dismissed Prime Minister Khawaja Nazimuddin who had then enjoyed the confidence of the parliament. Mohammad Ali Bogra was appointed to form a government the same day. Looking through declassified documents at the US National Archives you will understand that the main benefactors of the change were always two elements, Pakistan’s army and the US.
Please see blow the US ambassador’s telegram from the embassy in Karachi sent on April 18th, 1953
Barbaric: 86-Year Sentence for Aafia Siddiqui
by Andy Worthington
Sep 24, 2010
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 U.S. to face a trial after she reportedly tried -- and failed -- to shoot two U.S. soldiers in Ghazni, Afghanistan in July 2008, has been sentenced to 86 years in prison.
Such a disproportionate sentence would be barbaric, even if Aafia Siddiqui had killed the soldiers she shot at, but as she missed entirely, and was herself shot twice in the abdomen, it simply doesn't make sense. Moreover, the sentencing overlooks claims by her lawyers that her fingerprints were not even on the gun that she allegedly fired, and, even more significantly, hints at a chilling cover-up, mentioned everywhere except at Dr. Siddiqui's trial earlier this year. Seen this way, her sudden reappearance in Ghazni in July 2008, the shooting incident, the trial and the conviction were designed to hide the fact that, for five years and four months, from March 2003, when she and her three children were reportedly kidnapped in Karachi, she was held in secret U.S. detention -- possibly in the US prison at Bagram, Afghanistan -- where she was subjected to horrendous abuse.
The truth about Aafia Siddiqui's story, as I have mentioned in previous articles... is difficult to discern, but too many unanswered questions had already been brushed off before this vile sentence was delivered, which involve not only Dr. Siddiqui, but also two of her three children, Ahmed and Mariam, who only resurfaced last September, and in April this year. The whereabouts of her third child, Suleiman, who was just a baby when she first disappeared, has never been disclosed, and there are fears that he was killed when she was initially kidnapped.
As for Mariam, an article at the time of her reappearance stated that she "claim[ed] she was kept in a 'cold, dark room' for seven years," allegedly in Bagram, and in late August 2008, Michael G. Garcia, the attorney general of the southern region of New York, "confirmed in a letter to Siddiqui's sister, Dr. Fowzia Siddiqui, that her son, Ahmed, had been in the custody of the FBI since 2003 and that he was currently in the custody of the Karzai government in Afghanistan," even though the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, had previously claimed that Washington "had no information regarding the children." The article added that Ahmed was finally released to the custody of Siddiqui's family in Pakistan in September 2009, and later "gave a statement to police in Lahore that he had been held in a juvenile prison in Afghanistan for years."
Like everything in the story of Aafia Siddiqui, which remains, in many ways, the most opaque story in the whole of the "War on Terror," it is difficult to say what is true and what is not, but these accounts, as well as eyewitness accounts from other prisoners, including the British resident and former Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed, who has stated that he saw Aafia Siddiqui in Bagram, serve only to demonstrate that, not only is an 86-year sentence the most abominable miscarriage of justice, but also that it meshes perfectly with the notion that this whole sad story is an enormous cover-up. As I asked six months ago:
If Aafia Siddiqui was indeed held in secret US custody for over five years, was the story of the attempted shooting of the U.S. soldiers in July 2008 a cynical set-up, designed to ensure that she could be transferred to the U.S. and tried, convicted and imprisoned without the true story coming to light?
For someone once touted as a significant al-Qaeda operative, it is, to say the least, convenient that she has been sentenced to 86 years in prison on charges that -- beyond the prosecutors' claim that she was an al-Qaeda supporter and a danger to the U.S. -- completely ignored her alleged role in al-Qaeda. The entire court case also avoided the valid presumption that, if she was indeed regarded as an al-Qaeda operative, it would not be surprising if, like many dozens of other "high-value detainees," she suffered years of torture in U.S. custody, and then, somehow, had to be disposed of.
While some of these prisoners ended up in Guantánamo, and others were stealthily delivered on one-way trips to prisons in their home countries, Aafia Siddiqui ended up in New York, rendered -- there is no other word -- from Afghanistan. And although she urged her supporters in court to remain calm yesterday, telling them, "Don't get angry. Forgive Judge Berman," it may be that, in delivering what he referred to as an "appropriate" sentence of "significant incarceration," Judge Richard Berman may have done just what the CIA wanted.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (Pluto Press), and the co-director, with Polly Nash, of the documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here, where a version of this article was first published.
Sep 24, 2010
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 U.S. to face a trial after she reportedly tried -- and failed -- to shoot two U.S. soldiers in Ghazni, Afghanistan in July 2008, has been sentenced to 86 years in prison.
Such a disproportionate sentence would be barbaric, even if Aafia Siddiqui had killed the soldiers she shot at, but as she missed entirely, and was herself shot twice in the abdomen, it simply doesn't make sense. Moreover, the sentencing overlooks claims by her lawyers that her fingerprints were not even on the gun that she allegedly fired, and, even more significantly, hints at a chilling cover-up, mentioned everywhere except at Dr. Siddiqui's trial earlier this year. Seen this way, her sudden reappearance in Ghazni in July 2008, the shooting incident, the trial and the conviction were designed to hide the fact that, for five years and four months, from March 2003, when she and her three children were reportedly kidnapped in Karachi, she was held in secret U.S. detention -- possibly in the US prison at Bagram, Afghanistan -- where she was subjected to horrendous abuse.
The truth about Aafia Siddiqui's story, as I have mentioned in previous articles... is difficult to discern, but too many unanswered questions had already been brushed off before this vile sentence was delivered, which involve not only Dr. Siddiqui, but also two of her three children, Ahmed and Mariam, who only resurfaced last September, and in April this year. The whereabouts of her third child, Suleiman, who was just a baby when she first disappeared, has never been disclosed, and there are fears that he was killed when she was initially kidnapped.
As for Mariam, an article at the time of her reappearance stated that she "claim[ed] she was kept in a 'cold, dark room' for seven years," allegedly in Bagram, and in late August 2008, Michael G. Garcia, the attorney general of the southern region of New York, "confirmed in a letter to Siddiqui's sister, Dr. Fowzia Siddiqui, that her son, Ahmed, had been in the custody of the FBI since 2003 and that he was currently in the custody of the Karzai government in Afghanistan," even though the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, had previously claimed that Washington "had no information regarding the children." The article added that Ahmed was finally released to the custody of Siddiqui's family in Pakistan in September 2009, and later "gave a statement to police in Lahore that he had been held in a juvenile prison in Afghanistan for years."
Like everything in the story of Aafia Siddiqui, which remains, in many ways, the most opaque story in the whole of the "War on Terror," it is difficult to say what is true and what is not, but these accounts, as well as eyewitness accounts from other prisoners, including the British resident and former Guantánamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed, who has stated that he saw Aafia Siddiqui in Bagram, serve only to demonstrate that, not only is an 86-year sentence the most abominable miscarriage of justice, but also that it meshes perfectly with the notion that this whole sad story is an enormous cover-up. As I asked six months ago:
If Aafia Siddiqui was indeed held in secret US custody for over five years, was the story of the attempted shooting of the U.S. soldiers in July 2008 a cynical set-up, designed to ensure that she could be transferred to the U.S. and tried, convicted and imprisoned without the true story coming to light?
For someone once touted as a significant al-Qaeda operative, it is, to say the least, convenient that she has been sentenced to 86 years in prison on charges that -- beyond the prosecutors' claim that she was an al-Qaeda supporter and a danger to the U.S. -- completely ignored her alleged role in al-Qaeda. The entire court case also avoided the valid presumption that, if she was indeed regarded as an al-Qaeda operative, it would not be surprising if, like many dozens of other "high-value detainees," she suffered years of torture in U.S. custody, and then, somehow, had to be disposed of.
While some of these prisoners ended up in Guantánamo, and others were stealthily delivered on one-way trips to prisons in their home countries, Aafia Siddiqui ended up in New York, rendered -- there is no other word -- from Afghanistan. And although she urged her supporters in court to remain calm yesterday, telling them, "Don't get angry. Forgive Judge Berman," it may be that, in delivering what he referred to as an "appropriate" sentence of "significant incarceration," Judge Richard Berman may have done just what the CIA wanted.
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (Pluto Press), and the co-director, with Polly Nash, of the documentary film, "Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo." He maintains a blog here, where a version of this article was first published.
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