A victim of U.S. torture

Free Aafia Siddiqui

By Sara Flounders
New York

Now that the documents recording the systematic torture of thousands of prisoners in secret U.S. prisons have been released to the world media in U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Aug. 24 report, the secret documents on the imprisonment and torture of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui must also be released.

Days before Siddiqui, a woman weighing less than 90 pounds, was again forcibly brought into United States District Court in Manhattan on contradictory charges of trying to murder FBI agents in Afghanistan, these documents of what the FBI and CIA are really doing in Afghanistan and in secret prisons around the world were referenced in major news stories for all to read.

Siddiqui has been held in secret detention since she was kidnapped in Pakistan at the age of 30. The now 36-year-old, U.S.-educated, Pakistani neuroscientist continues in court to say that she has been tortured. She has refused to accept visits even from appointed defense lawyers because the brutal and humiliating strip searches that she is subjected to are so personally and culturally degrading and excruciatingly painful.

Siddiqui has wounds and scars from her sternum to her lower abdomen after being shot by U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Her charges of being tortured for years are hardly groundless. These acts are documented again and again on every page of the newly-released documents.

Tens of thousands of pages confirm in the most graphic details that CIA interrogators threatened to kill the children of detainees; threatened sexual assaults; threatened bound prisoners with guns and an electric drill; used water boarding against one prisoner 183 times; used shocking into unconsciousness, brutal strip searches, mock executions, confinement in a tiny box and continued slamming of the head.

Holder announced on Aug. 29 the appointment of a special federal prosecutor to investigate the interrogation practices of the CIA. These new documents represent the largest release of information about the Bush administration’s once-secret system of capturing terrorism suspects and interrogating them in undisclosed locations around the world.

An ACLU lawsuit compelled the release of the CIA’s own 2004 Inspector General’s internal report on stomach-turning interrogations. These documents of “enhanced interrogation” tactics were heavily ‘redacted’ or censored with whole pages blocked out for “security reasons.”

This 2004 report shows that the CIA kept detailed observational records on thousands of prisoners and the impact of their torture techniques on the human psyche. They made systematic measurements of the prisoners’ reactions to torture. From the censured documents it is clear that medical doctors and psychologists betrayed their professions by monitoring calibrated, incremental increases of torture to bring about excruciating pain, terror, humiliation and shame. The documents make it clear that all tortures were designed to create a systematic emotional and psychological breakdown in the interrogated prisoners.

Held in secret prisons

Aafia Siddiqui is a graduate of  the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis University. She is a deeply devout Muslim, who had been supportive of Muslim charities in Boston. On March 30, 2003, during a trip home to Karachi to visit her mother, she was kidnapped and “disappeared,” along with her three children.

Human rights organizations had long demanded that U.S. and Pakistani intelligence agencies account for her disappearance. Human Rights Watch, a year before she was shot and flown to the U.S., considered her among those held at a “CIA black site”—a secret prison.

U.S. officials denied any knowledge of her for five years. But as far back as April 2003, the Press Trust of India reported that she had been arrested in Karachi and was being questioned by the FBI. U.S. intelligence sources at that time confirmed that Siddiqui was “essentially in the hands of the FBI now.”

Siddiqui’s family retained U.S. attorney Elaine Whitfield Sharp of Massachusetts to try to discover her location and to serve as their spokeswoman to the media. She had been filing cases seeking information in U.S. courts ever since Siddiqui’s disappearance.

Millions of people in Pakistan and throughout the Muslim world, along with many human rights groups, always believed that the U.S. government forces and the Inter Services Intelligence of Pakistan had captured and tortured her and were holding her in secret prisons in Pakistan or Afghanistan. Many believe that she was the prisoner described as the Grey Lady of Bagram Prison at the U.S. Air Base in Afghanistan. Prisoners released from secret detention at Bagram described hearing the continuing howls of a woman prisoner being repeatedly raped and tortured. According to The Daily Times of Pakistan, “The cries of this helpless woman echoed with such torment in the jail that it prompted prisoners to go on hunger strike.” (July 7, 2008)

A growing number of media in the region began reporting that Siddiqui had been in Bagram for the last five years, and calls for her release were escalating.

Contradictory charges

On Aug. 4, 2008, the U.S. government suddenly announced that Siddiqui had been arrested on July 17 and charged with attempted murder and assault of U.S. officers and employees. She was then flown to the U.S. in the custody of FBI agents.

Attorney Sharp told the New York Times, “We believe Aafia has been in U.S. custody ever since she disappeared.” (Aug. 5, 2008)

In another interview with Action in Solidarity with Asia and the Pacific, she said: “We do know she was at Bagram for a long time. According to my client she was there for years and she was held in American custody; her treatment was horrendous.” (www.asia-pacific-action.org, Aug. 7)

A series of contrary reports claimed that U.S. soldiers, trying to take her from Afghan police who had arrested her in Ghazni, a city in central Afghanistan, had shot her after she managed to grab an M-4 rifle and shoot at two FBI agents. Neither agent was wounded.

How this 90-pound prisoner surrounded by both U.S. soldiers and Afghan police accomplished this was never explained. Other reports were that she was shot in the abdomen because U.S. soldiers feared she was a suicide bomber.

Neither the Afghan nor U.S. reports of how, when or even where Siddiqui was captured correspond with each other. The U.S. version claims she had maps of New York City targets in her handbag. Afghan officials claim the maps were of Afghan targets. What is known is that Siddiqui has been horribly brutalized and has been held in total isolation now for a year in U.S. prisons with terrible, life-threatening injuries.

The case has generated outrage all over the Muslim world. Dr. Siddiqui has become a symbol of the thousands of those who have “disappeared” and been tortured by expanding U.S. wars in the region.

Dr. Siddiqui has been brought into court in a wheelchair. This writer heard her tell the court again on Sept. 3, in her weak voice that she was tortured. She has been kept in extreme isolation and forced to listen to threats on the lives of her children. She was shown a picture of her son lying in a pool of his own blood.

Siddiqui’s 12-year-old son has recently been released to her family. Her 11-year-old daughter is still unaccounted for. It is believed that her youngest, an infant at the time of Siddiqui’s disappearance, died in custody.

Court hearings on Siddiqui’s sanity ruled that she was fit to stand trial, although she was found to be delusional and depressed. U.S. attorney William Ruskin stated to the court that information about where she was for five years is “not relevant to these proceedings.”

Pakistan’s parliament unanimously passed a resolution that demanded immediate information on the whereabouts of Siddiqui’s three children and demanded her immediate repatriation to Pakistan. A parliamentary delegation came to visit her. Facing growing mass outrage in Pakistan, the government allocated $2 million for U.S. lawyers to aid in her defense.

At a Sept. 3 court appearance, Siddiqui’s trial date was set for Nov. 2. The courtroom was full of Pakistani and other Muslim supporters. Activists from the Pakistan USA Freedom Forum and other organizations have mobilized on days when Dr. Siddiqui is brought into court.

In addition to Elaine Sharp, the lawyer hired by the family, the lawyers hired by the Pakistani government are Linda Moreno and Charles Swift. Another lawyer, Chad Hadgar, will assist the team, as will the court-appointed defense attorney, Dawn Cardi. Moreno was a lawyer for Dr. Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian unjustly imprisoned in the U.S.

The legal team was appointed over Siddiqui’s rejection of all lawyers. Linda Moreno said in a Sept. 3 press briefing that she felt that the legal team would have to earn Dr. Siddiqui’s trust because: “After what she has been through she has no trust for the whole system. What has been done to Dr. Siddiqui is disgusting, degrading and humiliating. This is a Guantánamo case outside of Guantánamo. ... Dr. Siddiqui has been treated worse than the detainees at Guantánamo. ... We are confident that the evidence in this case will show that Dr. Siddiqui harmed no one. To the contrary, this 90-pound mother of three was shot and wounded herself, the alleged circumstances of which are not supported by evidence. Dr. Siddiqui harmed no one. She is innocent of these charges.”

This is a case that must be taken up in full solidarity by the entire progressive movement, including the women’s movement, the movement for immigrant rights and the broad movement against U.S. racism and war.

The demand for Siddiqui’s freedom must be combined with the demand for the release of all the secret documents on Siddiqui’s long imprisonment. The 130,000 pages of documents released by Holder confirm that the most detailed records were kept, with Nazi-like meticulousness, on the wrenching torture and racist abuse of countless prisoners held in U.S. secret prisons.

The case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui exposes the whole sordid torturous role of the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and the widening war in Pakistan. Support for her freedom and return to her family in Pakistan is a basic demand for human rights and justice for a woman who has been horrendously abused.

A rally to support Siddiqui is planned for Nov. 2 in front of U.S. District Court, 500 Pearl Street in Manhattan.

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