Sept 26 2010
No word would be too strong to condemn the shocking verdict handed down to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. Despite the nightmarish ordeal that the MIT-trained, Pakistani neuroscientist has been through over the past seven years and the spectacular mockery of justice that her trial has been, nothing could have prepared anyone for this. Eighty-six years for a crime that she did not commit and for which no evidence exists except the spurious claims of the prosecution and white lies of US authorities.
Such a sentence would be unjust even if she had killed the men she has been accused of shooting at. Interestingly, it turns out, none of the heavily armed US officials were hurt in the assault that the lone woman is supposed to have carried out with a sophisticated M-4 rifle in Ghazni. Instead, Siddiqui herself ended up with two gunshot wounds in her abdomen fired by her would-be “victims.” Moreover, as Siddiqui’s lawyers argued, how come there were no fingerprints of the accused on the gun?
None of these issues were addressed during the trial. But then they were not supposed to be. It was a sham trial from the word get-go. This was a big fraud on US justice system. Clearly, the verdict had been reached even before the trial had begun.
Else, Judge Richard Bergman would not have ignored the testimony of FBI’s own firearms expert, expressing serious doubts if the gun was ever fired at the “crime scene”. More important, the court totally ignored the elephant in the room: That if Siddiqui was an Al-Qaeda mastermind and an accomplice of 9/11 planners, as the US authorities have claimed for years, why she wasn’t tried on terrorism charges? In fact, the “T” word never figured in the whole trial. Yet the judge sentenced her to 86 years in prison as a “terror threat.”
Siddiqui was picked up with her three children in Karachi in March 2003. She reappeared in US custody in Afghanistan five years later. Where was she all the while? Rights groups, her family and fellow inmates of infamous Bagram prison claim that she was in the US custody all along and tortured like hundreds of other usual suspects were. When they lost interest in her, she was conveniently discovered in Afghanistan and “rendered” to New York to be disposed of — judicially.
Whatever the truth, clearly it is not what the world has been made to believe. What has happened to Siddiqui is not just a gross miscarriage of justice but an affront to America’s claims to champion freedom, justice and rule of law. On the other hand, she has been betrayed by her own country and leaders too, who failed to get her released or repatriated despite the close ties with the US and the crucial role Pakistan is playing in the US war in Afghanistan or on terror. Since 9/11, hundreds of “suspects” have been turned over to Washington and in return they couldn’t get one innocent woman back.
The poor woman has already suffered enough — horrific physical abuse and endless mental torture, not to mention the loss of her child in detention. America owes her an apology, not another endless nightmare behind the bars. No wonder across the Muslim world, including Pakistan, Siddiqui has become the face of America’s callousness and contempt for due process. President Barack Obama must intervene to end her ordeal now. Let Siddiqui go home, Mr. President.