Wanted Women

by Deborah Scroggins

  To U.S. civil rights attorneys, Aafia’s case looked like the one they had been waiting for since the terror war had begun—the one that would reveal to everyone what the administration had been doing with its secret prisoners. If Aafia really had been locked up since 2003, she would be the first of the administration’s ghost prisoners to be charged in a U.S. court. “You could have a judicial inquiry into how someone was treated at a black site—it would be incredibly valuable,” said Jonathan Hafetz, the director of litigation for the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice.

  A mass of secret U.S. cables, released by WikiLeaks in 2010, showed that even the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad had been asking other U.S. government departments whether Aafia had been in secret custody. “Bagram officials have assured us that they have not been holding Siddiqui for the last four years, as is alleged,” the embassy wrote on July 31, 2008, in a confidential cable about the case.

  By chance, one of America’s most celebrated civil litigators, Elizabeth Fink, happened to be on duty when Aafia was brought into court, and Fink was appointed to defend her. A large, untidy woman with a wild halo of gray curls, Fink was known to relish nothing more than highly political fights like this one. Her late law partner, William Kunstler, had defended the blind sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in the World Trade Center trials in the mid-1990s. Since the 9/11 attacks, Fink herself had defended another of Sheikh Omar’s lawyers, Lynne Stewart, against charges of aiding terrorists. American and Pakistani lawyers alike commented on how lucky Aafia was to have Fink on her side. Fink quickly declared that the charges against her new client were “patently absurd” and asked that the case be dismissed.

  The next day, Elaine Whitfield Sharp flew to New York to join Fink and one of her associates for a meeting with Aafia at the Metropolitan Detention Center, the same high-security Brooklyn jail in which Uzair Paracha and Ramzi Yousef had been held.

  Aafia was in a wheelchair. She said her wound, which stretched from her sternum to her pubic bone, still hurt. But she spoke to the lawyers for almost three hours through a food slot in the reception area while they crouched down to hear her.

  Sharp came out of the meeting seething with indignation. She told reporters that Aafia had said she had been imprisoned at Bagram for a long time. “She doesn’t know how many years, but it was the same location, and her captors were Americans, and the treatment was horrendous,” Sharp told the Boston Globe. Fink claimed that the United States or its allies had planted the documents and other suspicious items that were found on Aafia: “She is the ultimate victim of the dark side.”

  But U.S. officials told a very different tale. They insisted that they had been looking for Aafia for years and had had no idea where she was before they took her into custody in July. They said the only time she had spent at Bagram was the two-week period after her surgery and before she was arrested and flown to the United States. “For several years, we have had no information regarding her whereabouts whatsoever,” said Gregory Sullivan, a State Department spokesman on South Asian affairs. It was “our belief,” Sullivan said, that she “has all this time been concealed from the public view by her own choosing.”

  As for the CIA, its people said they were delighted to have her at last.

  “She is the most significant capture in five years,” John Kiriakou, a retired CIA officer, told ABC News. Kiriakou had led the team that had caught the first key al-Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah. “We know that she’s extremely bright. She’s radicalized. We knew that she had been planning or at least involved in the planning of a variety of operations, whether they involved weapons of mass destruction or research into chemical or biological weapons, whether it was a possible attempt on the life of the president. We knew that she was involved with a great deal.”

  In interviews, as well as in the formal complaint against her, U.S. Justice Department officials cited the notes found in Aafia’s bag that Captain Snyder and his people had started sorting out in Ghazni. They said the notes listed U.S. targets, including the Statue of Liberty, the New York City subway system, and the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a U.S. government facility off the northeast coast of Long Island. The notes also speculated on how many people might die in “mass casualty attacks” and described ways not only to build a dirty bomb but also to bring down reconnaissance drones. Officials added that Aafia’s thumb drive contained the names of specific terrorist cells and planned attacks.

  U.S. prosecutors scoffed at Fink’s claim that the notes might have been planted on her. “Hundreds of pages—in her own handwriting?” one terrorism expert who was close to the government’s case told me. “She’s going to have a hard time convincing a jury of that.”

  But Aafia’s supporters found it equally unlikely that she would be carrying all those maps, substances, and recipes for bombs if she really was a terrorist. “A terrorist carrying manuals in [her] bag?” wrote “Uzair” from Islamabad to the Times Online. “That’s the most ridiculous story I’ve heard from the Americans for a while! She was held hostage at one of FBI’s dungeons for five years without charge, tortured.”

  Those who knew more were also mystified. Aafia’s uncle S. H. Faruqi noted uneasily that the bag described in the complaint sounded very similar to the heavy bag that Aafia had been carrying when she had paid her secretive visit to his house in January. Her ex-husband, Amjad, was struck by the reported detail that Aafia had been carrying pages from The Anarchist Arsenal. Was it possible, he wondered, that she still had the photocopies she had made before they left Boston in 2002?

  Amjad and his parents had been in shock since hearing of Aafia’s capture. Despite everything, Amjad had always believed that wherever she was, she would take care of his children. Surely she understood her obligation to them. Now he didn’t know what to think.

  For the time being there was no news at all about the boy captured with Aafia in Ghazni. But a videotape had appeared on YouTube of their press conference in Ghazni, and Amjad recognized the boy as his son Ahmad. Remembering the mysterious and inaccurate reports in July of Ismat’s death, he even wondered if the Siddiquis had concocted some dramatic plan to make Aafia reappear and the plan had gone drastically wrong. He could imagine his former wife being inspired by Yvonne Ridley’s “Prisoner 650” press conference to want to emerge from hiding and show the world who the real Aafia Siddiqui was. Amjad guessed that she had been traveling with Ahmad—on whatever mission she thought she was on—so that the boy could act as her male guardian. For Amjad still couldn’t believe that Aafia would become a suicide bomber, let alone turn her son into one.

  Yet the more he read, the angrier he got, thinking of the danger in which she had placed the boy.

  Aafia’s family sprang into clamorous action. They finally began making the sort of eloquent appeals that the families of other Pakistani “missing persons” had been making for several years now. After five years of refusing to give interviews, Fowzia held a press conference on August 5 with the president of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. “I have decided to break my silence to say that one is innocent until proven guilty,” she told reporters. “My sister is innocent and has never actually been accused of a crime. . . . Aafia was tortured for five years until one day the U.S. authorities announced that they have found her in Afghanistan.”

  Fowzia went on to assert that the United States had imprisoned Aafia because “she covers her hair and says her prayers.” She claimed that the family hadn’t previously reported Aafia missing because they had received death threats from self-described intelligence agents. Three weeks after she had told the Lahore lawyer Iqbal Jaffree that the United States was “safekeeping” Aafia’s two younger children, Fowzia now announced that she didn’t know where Maryam and Suleman were.

  That statement, like several others Fowzia made, was laced with inaccuracies. For example, Aafia had been accused of a crime: she had been charged with attempted murder and assault. Moreover, the United States was har
dly arresting every Muslim woman who covered her hair. Yet with the eager approval of the Pakistani establishment, the country’s press swallowed her performance whole.

  The Asian Human Rights Commission, on August 8, released a photo of a crumpled Aafia, lying down with her eyes closed and what appeared to be a swollen lip and broken nose. The governor of Ghazni later said the photo had been taken on July 17, after the police had beaten her. But in the press release that accompanied the photo, the Asian Human Rights Commission claimed that it “showed evidence of years of physical abuse.” The same release claimed that she had been tortured to force her into testifying against KSM at his eventual trial for directing the 9/11 attacks. But rather than asking about the link between Aafia and KSM, Pakistan’s press and political parties seized on the photo as proof that she was a victim of American torture. For Pakistanis, the image of the beaten Aafia would become as iconic as the picture of the scarecrow-hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib was in Iraq.

  Aafia attended a bail hearing on August 11 in a wheelchair. Dozens of Pakistanis bearing placards demonstrated outside, and the courtroom itself was filled with her supporters. Islamist groups appeared to be organizing many of the protests.

  Aafia had told the FBI that the boy she had been captured with was an orphan she had brought to Afghanistan because she did not want to travel unaccompanied. (She also said that her family had told her not to go to Afghanistan but she hadn’t been thinking clearly.) When agents confronted her with the boy’s statement that the two of them had been living in the Pakistani town of Multan with Aafia’s mother, Ismat, before traveling to Afghanistan, Aafia “vehemently denied” it, according to the FBI’s report of her interrogation.

  In August, however, U.S. officials informed the Siddiquis that DNA tests in Afghanistan had revealed that the boy really was Aafia’s oldest son, Ahmad.

  Aafia appeared to shut down after she learned that the FBI had discovered Ahmad’s real identity and that the Afghan authorities were still holding the boy. She refused to see her lawyers, talk with them on the phone, or even receive mail. At the Metropolitan Detention Center, officials reported that she cried a great deal. She had asked them, they said, to put turkey from her meal in the refrigerator for her son, who she feared was being starved or tortured.

  Aafia’s mother provided a hint of what might have been preying on Aafia’s mind. U.S. officials had found eleven-year-old Ahmad’s birth certificate in Boston, and they knew he would turn twelve in November. Under U.S. law, a child over the age of twelve can be required to testify against his parents. According to a memo later filed by Aafia’s defense, Ahmad had told investigators that he believed that he and his mother were on a suicide mission in Ghazni. And Ismat told Pakistan’s Frontier Post that she feared that U.S. officials planned to hold the boy without charge until he was old enough to testify against Aafia.

  The Pakistani public followed each twist of the drama with breathless sympathy. No matter what the news about Aafia, Geo TV ran the same banner: “Aafia Siddiqui—A Human Rights Tragedy.” The Daily Times reported that sources in the Sindh government had said that official documents proved that Aafia and her children had been arrested on March 30, 2003—but the documents were never produced. It became an article of faith, though, that Aafia had been handed over to the FBI after this often-cited arrest. Moreover, despite everything that Pakistanis had seen of gun-toting jihadi women during the Lal Mosque crisis, most professed to find it impossible to believe that an upper-middle-class Pakistani woman could have picked up a military rifle and fired it at a U.S. soldier.

  A Pakistani journalist in Washington was one of the few among his country’s commentators to express some skepticism about the nimbus of martyrdom surrounding Aafia. Khalid Hasan, the longtime Washington correspondent for the Daily Times, reported on August 20 that the United States planned to bring additional and more serious charges against Aafia, ranging from money laundering to attempting to procure military equipment—both on behalf of al-Qaeda. He said the United States believed she had been underground for five years and that her children had been with her. A few days later, Hasan, who was dying of cancer, wrote a despairing column in which he described Pakistan’s uncritical embrace of Aafia as another example of a suicidal unwillingness to face reality. “There is little interest in or scant regard for facts,” Hasan wrote. “What matters are opinions, which are held with such vehemence that those in disagreement should be prepared for an assault or, at the very least, denunciation as this or that foreign power’s agent.”

  But no one listened to him. Pakistan’s government was teetering on the brink of collapse. A few days after Aafia was charged, Musharraf’s turbulent reign ended with his resignation. Elections were called for September. Citing the example of the eighth-century Muslim conqueror of Aafia’s home province of Sindh, Aafia’s supporters lamented that her case proved once again how low Muslims and their secular rulers had sunk. The great Muhammad bin Qasim, they cried, had seized all of Sindh to rescue a Muslim woman! Now Muslims and Pakistanis like Musharraf openly sold pious women like Aafia to the enemies of Islam.

  After years of tactfully praising Musharraf’s government for its help, the Siddiquis now accused Pakistan’s intelligence agencies of betraying the nation by handing her over to the Americans. “Without the active help of the agencies,” Fowzia told reporters, it wouldn’t have been possible to move Aafia out of the country. She also claimed (without evidence or even a relevant statement from Aafia or her lawyers) that her sister had been raped and tortured in prison and that the United States was denying her medical treatment. Her charges appeared on Pakistan’s front pages.

  Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, wrote a letter to Dawn denouncing “erroneous and irresponsible media reports” and denying that the United States was mistreating Aafia in any way. Fowzia denounced Patterson’s letter as “a pack of lies.” On August 21, three days after Musharraf’s resignation, Fowzia addressed the Pakistani Senate: “A few months back I felt I was alone with an ailing mother, but today I feel I have millions of family members with me in this plight to stand up to defend the ultimate symbol of purity and innocence—my sister, Aafia Siddiqui.”

  The National Assembly passed a unanimous resolution calling for Aafia’s repatriation. The Senate voted to send a delegation to meet her.

  Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Ali Zardari, who had been elected prime minister, now became president. Zardari’s new interior minister, Rehman Malik, understood better than most that Aafia’s marriage to Ali, KSM’s nephew, linked her to the single most violent and extreme faction in all of jihad. As head of Pakistan’s Federal Investigation Agency in the 1990s, Malik had tracked down Ramzi Yousef and his accomplices for Benazir Bhutto, including KSM’s elusive older brother Zahid al-Sheikh. Malik knew that KSM’s family operated at the intersection of Pakistan’s jihadi groups, al-Qaeda, and the ISI; and Malik and President Zardari both believed that the dark forces behind that family were the same ones that had killed Benazir Bhutto.

  Yet these new top officials did not challenge the Siddiqui family’s claims. Instead, they promised their support for Aafia’s defense.

  The Bush administration had stepped up its drone attacks on the Taliban’s tribal areas, killing hundreds of civilians in addition to some militants and inflaming Pakistani public opinion. Meanwhile, the Taliban and their allies seized bigger and bigger chunks of territory. They had extended their reach deep into Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, where they busied themselves blowing up girls’ schools, enlisting boys as suicide bombers, and murdering policemen and elected officials. More than a million Pakistanis in the north had been driven from their homes. Even in the country’s normally placid capital, the horror of Taliban-backed suicide bombs kept people on edge.

  I decided I badly needed to go back.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Ayaan’s father died about a week after her visit, on August 25, 2008.

  The British press took no notice. B
ut Somali Web sites and newspapers everywhere ran the great man’s three-page obituary with the same youthful, optimistic photograph of him in a pin-striped suit that Ayaan carried in her wallet. Somalis flocked to his funeral from all over the United Kingdom and Europe. For many, his death marked the final passing of that moment when the newborn Somali state had first stood on its wobbly legs and men like Hirsi had imagined that they would build “America in Africa.” All that was gone now, smashed in “the apocalypse,” as Somalis called the multisided civil war that continued to burn in Somalia.

  Ayaan and her father never had the emotional reconnection that The Weekly Standard said Frederick Douglass and his former master had enjoyed—that last parting in which “each acknowledged ways he had wronged the other . . . conversed freely about the past and parted reconciled.” For some reason, Ayaan hadn’t called, hadn’t gone to London sooner. At the time she had told herself that the trip was simply not convenient; but now that her father was dead, she wondered whether she had been afraid to open the door to the past. “If I had gone to his side and spoken truthfully to him before he died, I might have had to open an emotional closet I have nailed shut,” she wrote. She was filled with regret.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  This time in Islamabad, I stayed with friends rather than at the Marriott. Pakistan would soon overtake Iraq as the world capital of suicide bombing, and by September 2008 it was too dangerous to hang around a hotel that the jihadis had already tried twice to bomb. In the first eight months of that year, more than 471 Pakistanis had been killed in suicide attacks, most of them the work of the Pakistani Taliban. The United States, meanwhile, continued firing missiles at the militants in Waziristan, and ordinary Pakistanis, angry and terrified, felt caught in the middle.