Prisoner No.
650
By AIJAZ ZAKA SYED
13/08/08 "Middle
East Times'
-- Just when you
think Uncle Sam's war has no more surprises to spring on
an unsuspecting world, he comes up with yet another gem.
Take the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani
neuroscientist who grew up in the U.S. and went to top
universities including the prestigious Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
The woman who had been a star student and a topper
throughout a remarkable career had to leave the United
States when the authorities began harassing her and her
husband for their charity activities in the wake of
Sept. 11, 2001 upheavals.
The family settled down in Karachi and was never
involved in any illegal activities. One day in March
2003, this talented young woman went missing with her
three children when she was on her way to Karachi
airport.
Dr. Siddiqui resurfaced this week after five years in a
New York court as a "top al-Qaida terrorist." She was
barely able to walk and speak, which was not surprising
given the fact she had been recently involved in a "gun
fight with FBI agents" in Afghanistan. The U.S.
authorities claim Dr. Siddiqui was captured near the
governor's offices in Ghazni, Afghanistan last month
with a bag full of "suspicious liquids in tubes."
If you think this is an incredible yarn, here's some
more food for thought. We are told Siddiqui assaulted a
team of U.S. troops and FBI officials with a highly
sophisticated weapon when they went to quiz her in
Afghanistan.And where did she get the weapon?
Somebody had of course placed it near her rather
conveniently. She is said to have fired several rounds
with the hi-tech weapon.
Interestingly, while all those alleged rounds of firing
with the alleged weapon failed to wound or injure
America's brave soldiers, Siddiqui herself has ended up
with a bullet wound in her chest.
Even though one has never been enamored of the Bushies'
extraordinary intellectual powers, this cock-and-bull
tale is an insult to the intelligence of American people
as well as the rest of the world.
I mean they could have at least employed more
ingenuity of thought and imagination in cooking up this
incredibly bizarre case against a lone, defenseless,
half-dead woman who seems to have no clue where she is
or what she is accused of.
There are some basic questions that an ordinary mind
like mine just can't seem to figure out. |
IS THIS BAGRAM’S MYSTERIOUS
SCREAMING PRISONER? Mother-of-three Dr. Aafia
Siddiqui (2004 file photo) has resurfaced in a
New York court as a “top al-Qaida terrorist”
after disappearing five years ago. She was
barely able to walk and speak, which was not
surprising given the fact she had been recently
involved in a "gun fight with FBI agents" in
Afghanistan. A former Bagram prisoner has
written of a woman's endless screams for help as
she was tortured. Is Siddiqui this Prisoner No.
650?
|
First, where was Aafia Siddiqui hiding or hidden
all these years – since she went missing in Karachi in March
2003? How did she turn up in the remote Ghazni province in
Afghanistan, of all the God-forsaken places? And what happened
to her three children?
Second, if the MIT-educated neuroscientist was indeed an al-Qaida
mastermind, why wasn't she presented in a court of law all this
while?
Even today when she is facing the U.S. law, she is not being
tried on terrorism charges but for allegedly assaulting the U.S.
officials. So what's her original crime, if she has indeed
committed a crime?
Third, why wasn't the Pakistani government informed about her
detention in Afghanistan and her subsequent deportation to the
United States? Or are Pakistan's Enlightened and Moderate
leaders also involved in this international enterprise against a
31-year-old mom of three?
There are so many gaping holes in this "case" that the U.S.
constitution, Magna Carta and the U.N. human rights charter can
all go through them at the same time.
You abduct a completely innocent, married woman with a family
and put her away for five years to conveniently discover her now
as a terrorist in lawless Afghanistan.
Elaine Whitfield Sharp, Siddiqui's lawyer, believes she has been
put on trial now because she has "become a terrible
embarrassment" to the U.S. and Afghan authorities.
The question is why has she been reinvented now? It is quite
possible that Siddiqui has been FOUND now because of a
relentless campaign by British journalist Yvonne Ridley.
Ridley herself had been a prisoner of the Taliban regime for 11
days just before the U.S. invasion in 2001 and converted to
Islam after her strange experience in Afghanistan.
Ridley has been running a campaign called Cage Prisoner for the
release of a mysterious female prisoner who has been held at the
Bagram airbase in Afghanistan in total isolation and regularly
tortured for five years.
The unknown female prisoner, known as the Prisoner No. 650 or
the Grey Lady of Bagram, was brought to the world attention
after Ridley read about the woman in a book by fellow Briton
Moazzam Begg, a former Gitmo and Bagram prisoner.
In his book, "Enemy Combatant," Beg talks of a woman's endless
screams for help as she was tortured. Beg first thought he was
imagining his wife's screams.
"We now know the screams came from a woman who has been held in
Bagram for some years. And she is Prisoner No. 650," Ridley
disclosed at a recent press conference in Pakistan.
And I strongly suspect that Prisoner No. 650 is none other than
Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. It is quite possible that her captors
decided to end her isolation after the Pakistani press and
activists like Yvonne Ridley began increasingly talking about
the Prisoner No. 650 and how she was tortured and abused
physically, mentally and sexually for the past four years.
I find it hard to believe all this can happen in this age and
time.
When one read Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel
laureate who died last week, years ago and his first person
account of the Soviet gulag and how they turned living human
beings into humanity's refuse, one thought it could never happen
in our age and time. But one is not so sure now.
If they could do this to a gifted, U.S.-educated and trained
scientist, I shudder to think of the fate of illiterate and
impoverished men and women summarily picked up in Pakistan,
Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The Aafia Siddiqui case may have come to the world's attention
because of some conscientious activists. But what about all
those innocent individuals, who have just vanished down the
black hole called the Guantanamo Bay, without a trial and
without anyone looking for them? And who knows how many such
gulags are out there and how many innocents they have sucked
into their belly?
This war has turned the whole world into a big gulag where there
are no borders, no rule of law, no courts, no justice and no
rights whatsoever. But, the neocons reassure us, all this is
necessary to promote Democracy and Human Freedom of course.
Whatever happened to the America of Jefferson and Lincoln, the
country that we all loved once and turned to for inspiration?
Aijaz Zaka Syed is Opinion Editor of Khaleej Times. Write to him
at
aijazsyed@khaleejtimes.com
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