AL JAZEERA– Since being the defendant in about six trials after I was arrested
for protesting the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, it’s my experience
that the police lie. Period.
However the lies don’t stop at street law enforcement level. From
lies about WMD and connections to “al Qaeda,” almost every institution
of so-called authority – the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, FBI, all
the way up to the Oval Office and back down – lie. Not white lies, but
big, Mother of all BS (MOAB) lies that lead to the destruction of
innocent lives. I.F Stone was most definitely on the ball when he
proclaimed, “Governments lie”.
Having clarified that, I would now like to examine a case that should
be enshrined in the travesty of the US Justice Hall of Shame.
In February of this year, Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani mother of
three, was convicted in US Federal (kangaroo) Court of seven counts,
including two counts of “attempted murder of an American.” On September
23, Judge Berman, who displayed an open bias against Dr. Siddiqui,
sentenced her to 86 years in prison.
The tapestry of lies about Dr. Siddiqui – a cognitive neuroscientist,
schooled at MIT and Brandeis – was woven during the Bush regime but
fully maintained during her trial and sentencing this year by the Obama
(in)Justice Department.
Before 9/11/2001, Aafia lived in Massachusetts with her husband, also
a Pakistani citizen, and their two children. According to all reports,
she was a quietly pious Muslim (which is still not a crime here in the
States), who hosted play dates for her children. She was a good student
who studied hard and maintained an exemplary record, causing little harm
to anything, let alone anyone.
After 9/11, when she was pregnant with her third child, she
encouraged her husband to move back to Pakistan to avoid the backlash
against her Muslim children – which was a very prescient thing to do
considering the Islamophobia that has only increased in this country
since then.
Tortured ‘truth’
Following the move to Pakistan, Dr. Siddiqui and her husband
divorced. Her life took a horrendous turn justly after. While Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) – supposed mastermind of the 9/11 plot – was being
water-boarded by the CIA 183 times in one month, he gave Dr. Siddiqui
up as a member of al-Qaeda. Was this a case of stolen identity, or was
Mohammed just saying random words like you or I would to stop the
torture?
There is some disputed “intelligence” that Aafia had married KSM’s
nephew, a tenuous allegation at best, and even so, guilt by association
has no place in the hallowed US legal system.
Following KSM’s torture-induced ‘insights’, Dr. Siddiqui was listed
by Bush’s Justice Department as one of the seven most dangerous al-Qaeda
operatives in the world. A mother of three equipped with a lethal
ability to ‘thin-slice’ your cognitive personality in seconds. If
alleged association and a healthy interest in neuro-psychology are the
definitive hallmarks of a ‘terrorist operative,’ then Malcolm Gladwell
better start making some phone calls to Crane, Poole and Schmidt.
A culture of falsehoods
Face it, we all know that since 9/11, there have been numerous false
“terror” alerts and lies leading to the capture and torture of hundreds
of innocent individuals – and the heinous treatment we have all
witnessed to from Abu Ghraib. Additionally, we are supposed to believe
that multi-war criminal, Colin Powell, was “fooled” by faulty
intelligence so much so that he paved the way for the invasion of Iraq
by his false testimony at the UN but we are also supposed to
unquestioningly believe the US intelligence apparatus when they lie
about others such as Dr. Siddiqui.
In any case, in a bizarre scenario – to make a very long story short –
Dr. Siddiqui and her three children disappeared for five years from
2003 to 2008, resurfacing in Ghazni, Afghanistan with her oldest child, a
son who was then 11. She claimed that for the years she was missing,
she was being held in various Pakistani and US prisons being tortured
and repeatedly raped. Many prisoners, including Yvonne Ridley, maintain
she was incarcerated in Bagram AFB and tortured for at least part of the
five missing years.
After Dr. Siddiqui resurfaced, she was arrested and taken to an
Afghan police station where four Americans – two military and two FBI
agents – rushed to “question” her through interpreters. The FBI and
military, claim that they were taken to a room that had a curtain at one
end and that they did not know that Dr. Siddiqui was lying asleep on a
bed at the other side of the curtain. As you read below it will become
blatantly obvious that personnel involved from both institutions totally
fabricated their stories.
This is the Americans’ version: They entered the room and one of the
military dudes said he laid his weapon down (remember, they were there
to interrogate one of the top most dangerous people in the world), and
Siddiqui got up, grabbed the weapon, yelling obscenities and that she
wanted to “kill Americans.” All 5’3″ of her raised the weapon to fire
and she fired the rifle twice, missing everyone in the small room – in
fact she even missed the walls, floor and ceiling since no bullets from
the rifle were ever recovered.
Then one of the Americans shot her twice in the stomach “in
self-defence.” It was shown at the trial that her fingerprints were not
even on the weapon. The only bullets that were found that day were in
Dr. Aafia’s body. How many stories of military cover-ups have we heard
about since 9/11? I can think of two right away without even trying
hard: Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch.
Hopeless injustice
Dr. Aafia’s side is this: After she was arrested, she was again
beaten and she fell asleep on a bed when she heard talking in the room
she was in so she got out of the bed and someone shouted: “Oh no, she’s
loose!” Then she was shot – when she was wavering in and out of
consciousness, she heard someone else say: “We could lose our jobs over
this.”
Even with no evidence that she fired any weapon, she was convicted
(the jury found no pre-meditation) by a jury and sentenced to the
aforementioned 86 years. It’s interesting that the Feds did not pursue
“terrorist” charges against Dr. Siddiqui because they were aware that
the only evidence that existed was tortured out of KSM – so they
literally ganged up on her to press the assault and attempted murder
charges.
Even if Dr. Siddiqui did shoot at the Americans, reflect on this. Say
this case was being tried in Pakistan under similar circumstances for
an American woman named Dr. Betty Brown who was captured and repeatedly
tortured and raped by the ISI – here in the states that woman would be a
hero if she shot at her captors – not demonized and taken away from her
life and her children.
I believe Dr. Aafia Siddiqui is a political prisoner and now the political bogey-woman for two US regimes.
In Pakistan, the response to her verdict and sentencing brought the
predictable mass protests, burning of American flags and effigies of
Obama and calls for Pakistan to repatriate Dr. Siddiqui. They know who
the real criminals are and who should be in prison for life! At present,
Hilary’s state department harps on about ‘soft power’ and diplomacy,
but what better way to quell US distrust in the Muslim world than to try
such cases with due diligence and integrity.
In the US, not many people know about this case. Obviously many
people were Hope-notized by the millions of dollars poured into the
Obama PR machine – and believed when he said that his administration
would be more transparent and lawful than the outlaws of the Bush era.
I guess they were mistaken.
Written by Cindy Sheehan, Photo by EPA
Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Specialist Casey A.
Sheehan, who was killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004. Since then, she has
been an activist for peace and human rights. She has published five
books, has her own Internet radio show, Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox, and has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Cindy lives in Oakland, CA, and loves to spend time with her three grand-babies. You can learn more about Cindy at Peace of the Action.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
© AL JAZEERA, 2010
AL JAZEERA