Chapter Thirty-five
If Aafia had listened to her lawyers, she might have been found not guilty.
She still hadn’t been charged with terrorism. The Justice Department thought it safer and easier to try to keep her behind bars for the attempted murder of U.S. soldiers in Ghazni than to charge her in connection with KSM’s plot to blow up gas stations. Trying her for terrorism would open the door to testimony from KSM, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Majid Khan, all of whom claimed to have been tortured in the CIA’s secret prisons.
Prosecutors believed they had a strong case for attempted murder of U.S. personnel, which, under a law passed by the U.S. Congress after the 1998 embassy bombings, carries even heavier penalties than ordinary murder charges. They had nine eyewitnesses, including three decorated U.S. soldiers, ready to testify that they had seen or heard Aafia fire the gun at Captain Robert Snyder on July 18, 2008. They also had the evidence of the documents and the nearly two pounds of sodium cyanide she was carrying, plus her own statements that she wanted to kill Americans, to show that she had a motive to shoot.
Yet, as Aafia’s lawyers pointed out, the government had no forensic evidence to support their witnesses’ statements—no bullets, no fingerprints, no shell casings, no gunshot residue. And no one had been hurt in the incident except Aafia. The government’s refusal, moreover, to address her lawyers’ claims that she might have been held in a secret prison before being dumped in Ghazni and that she might have been set up could have created a reasonable doubt about just what had happened. After all, the defense only needed one dubious juror to get a hung jury.
The Pakistani taxpayers paid the $2 million bill for Aafia’s brother to hire what Judge Richard Berman called a “dream team” of defense lawyers. There was Charles D. Swift, the former U.S. Navy litigator who had won Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the Supreme Court had ruled that the U.S. prison at Guantánamo was subject to U.S. and international law. There was Linda Moreno, the Florida-based attorney who had won acclaim for her defense of various Islamist groups in the Holy Land Foundation case in Texas, and there was Elaine Whitfield Sharp, the Marblehead, Massachusetts, lawyer whom Aafia’s family had first hired in 2004. The judge also ruled that the court-appointed Dawn Cardi should continue to defend Aafia.
This legal team had a simple plan: all Aafia had to do was keep quiet while they pointed out holes in the government’s case. But Aafia refused mostly even to look at them, much less take their advice. Sharp, who knew her best, genuinely believed that her client was mentally ill. She said that when Aafia deigned to speak to her, which wasn’t often, she made grandiose proclamations, such as her plans to reconcile the United States and the Taliban. When Sharp tried to talk to Aafia about the case, the prisoner would wave her away, claiming that greater powers would resolve her problem behind the scenes. After jury selection began in January 2010, Aafia stood up in court and demanded that Jews be kept off her jury. “If they have a Zionist or Israeli background . . . they are all mad at me,” she told Judge Berman. “I have a feeling everyone here is them—subject to genetic testing.”
As the trial began, the government’s witnesses took the stand one by one while Aafia often sat with her head on the table. To my mind, at least, the witnesses explained many things about the prosecution’s case that had initially seemed implausible. I had wondered whether a U.S. Special Forces chief warrant officer really would leave his M-4 assault rifle on the floor, where Aafia could reach it. But the warrant officer said he always put his rifle aside as a gesture of respect when meeting with Afghans. “You don’t talk to somebody with an assault rifle around your neck,” he said. And all the soldiers testified that they had had no idea when they entered the room in Ghazni and sat down that Aafia was behind the yellow curtain.
A few minutes later, however, they had found themselves looking down the barrel of a gun. So said the warrant officer, his Afghan interpreter, an FBI agent, a U.S. medic, and Captain Snyder. The Afghan interpreter told the court that as he lunged for her, Aafia had fired several shots. The warrant officer then pulled out his pistol and shot her in the abdomen.
Pakistani commentators had scoffed at the idea that a “frail woman” like Aafia could have lifted an assault rifle, much less fired several shots at heavily armed Americans before they fired back. The jury seemed to share this concern. But when prosecutors brought in the warrant officer’s rifle (which could also be used as a machine gun) and the jurors passed it around, the deadly M-4 was shown to be almost as small and light as a child’s toy. U.S. Attorney Jenna Dabbs was a woman about Aafia’s size. She demonstrated how easy it was to hold.
The defense was on firmer ground when it pointed to the absence of physical evidence. But there, too, prosecutors called expert witnesses who testified that it wasn’t unusual for fingerprints and other forensic evidence to be missing, especially considering that the shooting had taken place in a war zone, where the FBI had no control over the crime scene.
The government’s silence, however, about where Aafia had been since she disappeared in 2003 still seemed suspicious. Aafia’s lawyers also showed that Afghan police had beaten her badly the night before the shooting, and it seemed possible that her lawyers could have persuaded at least one juror that, even if she had seized the gun, she had done so in self-defense.
But before her legal team could unfurl its full case, and against their vehement advice, Aafia insisted on testifying.
Up on the stand, she looked so small and harmless that some of the Pakistani reporters who were present thought at first that she had made the right decision. As defense lawyers gingerly led her through the story of her life, she told the court in her high-pitched voice about how much she loved New York City, about the many awards she had won at MIT for public service, and how worried she was for her children. She claimed she had not even picked up the rifle at Ghazni but had just peeked from behind the curtain to see what was happening when she was shot. When asked if she had fired the gun, she answered that the charge was such a joke she had “sometimes been forced to smile under my scarf.” She added that she had not even known what an M-4 rifle looked like until she saw the one in court. She presented herself as exactly the sort of gentle middle-class Pakistani girl that most Pakistanis believed her to be. I could just picture how she must have charmed her professors at MIT and the University of Houston.
Yet, with the courtroom packed and the media listening carefully, Aafia avoided the question of where she had been for the five years before she was picked up in Ghazni. The judge had warned Aafia to stick to the subject of the shooting, but Sharp, who was questioning her, later conceded that once Aafia got onto the stand there was nothing to stop her from saying anything she wanted. Aafia made the same hazy claims she had made all along, but they lacked the punch and plausibility of many other prisoners’ accounts. She didn’t supply any details a jury could follow. “If you have been in a, I don’t know, secret prison, abused, you become more modest,” she said at one point when Sharp was asking her why she wore a veil. Then Sharp, who knew that the FBI’s Angela Sercer was standing by to testify that Aafia had told her at Bagram that she had spent the five years leading to her arrest in hiding, steered her back to the events at the Ghazni police station.
Under cross-examination, Dabbs caught Aafia telling what appeared to be one lie after another. Dabbs asked if the boy she was with was her son, Ahmad. Aafia claimed she didn’t know who the boy was. “I was in a daze at that time,” she said. At first she claimed that the documents in her bag had been given to her. Pointing out that many of the documents were in Aafia’s own handwriting, Dabbs put one up on an overhead screen that concerned the construction of a dirty bomb. In a vague and halting manner, Aafia claimed that she had been forced to copy it out of a magazine so that her children would not be tortured in front of her in a secret prison. Then she let the subject drop.
Dabbs asked Aafia why, if she had been imprisoned, she had told the FBI that she had been in hiding. Aafia claimed she had t
hought the FBI was playing the same “game” with her that the “fake Americans” who had held her in the secret prison had played, and therefore she had just told them what she thought they wanted to hear.
Finally Dabbs asked if it wasn’t true that she knew how to fire a gun because she had taken a pistol safety course at Braintree Rifle & Pistol Club while studying at MIT in 1993. At first Aafia said she probably had—“everybody used to take it.” Then she said she couldn’t remember. The next day, Dabbs produced her instructor from the club, Gary Woodworth. He testified that he remembered teaching her how to fire “hundreds of rounds.”
In his closing arguments, U.S. Assistant Attorney Christopher La Vigne pointed out that Aafia had not even given a straight answer when Dabbs had asked her if she was born in 1972, replying instead, “If you say so.” “She raised her right hand and she lied to your face,” La Vigne said. “She lied and lied and lied.”
Defense attorney Linda Moreno tried to persuade the jury to focus on the absence of physical evidence, but after deliberating for three days, the jurors returned with their verdict on February 3, 2010. Aafia was convicted on all seven counts of attempted murder and assault of U.S. personnel.
Her quiet brother, who had attended the trial every day, slumped over on his bench. Aafia herself twisted around to wag her finger at the spectators. “This is a verdict coming from Israel and not from America,” she cried. “Your anger should be directed where the anger belongs.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Ayaan’s new memoir, Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations, came out in the United States and United Kingdom in the spring of 2010.
In it, she used the slight opening of her renewed family contacts to flay them again for their failure to embrace modernity, by which she meant Western ways, as thoroughly as she had. For her pains in tracking Ayaan down to inform her that their father was dying, her half sister Sahra became the subject of a chapter that criticized her decision to remain a devout Muslim, wear the hijab, and live in the fold of her family. Ayaan admitted that she hadn’t seen Sahra since the girl was eight; she didn’t even pretend to know whether Sahra’s choices were her own, and she produced no evidence that Sahra was dangerous or anti-Western. Nevertheless, she wailed for our very civilization—at Sahra’s expense: “For how long will Western societies, whose roots drink from the rational sources of the Enlightenment, continue to tolerate the spread of Sahra’s way of life, like ivy on their trunks, an alien and possibly lethal growth?”
Once again, Islam was monolithically evil while the West was monolithically good with the exception of the feminists and liberals too cowardly to confront Islam. The only hope for Muslims, once again, was to trade their faith and culture for that of the West—including, if necessary, Christianity, Ayaan now wrote.
The reviews this time were decidedly mixed, though Ayaan still got plenty of praise. Her friend Christopher Hitchens wrote, “For me, the three most beautiful words in the emerging language of secular resistance to tyranny are Ayaan Hirsi Ali.” In the Christian Science Monitor Nathan Gardels described Nomad as “the most powerful book you will read in a long time.”
In the Netherlands, by contrast, reviewers were taken aback by the celebrated atheist’s surprise call for the Roman Catholic Church to embark on a missionary campaign for the souls of Muslim immigrants as a way of stemming what she called “the rising tide of jihad.” In the United States, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times chided her for “excoriating a varied faith that has more than a billion adherents,” and Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times dismissed the book as an “anti-Islamic screed” and “a tough jeremiad to read.” In Britain, the book’s reception was perhaps colored by what the celebrity Web sites persisted in calling the “Famously Snobby Divorce Scandal” between Ayaan’s new love, Niall Ferguson, and his wife, Susan Douglas.
Meeting Ayaan at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, Tony Allen-Mills of the Times of London wrote that he actually wanted to ask her about her circumcision. But he settled for inquiring about the “odd epilogue at the end of Nomad titled ‘Letter to My Unborn Daughter.’ ” Was Ayaan pregnant? She said she wasn’t. In the Guardian, Emma Brockes wrote that Ayaan was almost “coyly glamorous, moving with fawn-like grace.” “It’s a combination,” Brockes said, “that works particularly well on male polemicists of the muscular left, who can’t do enough to defend her: her gentle charm, her small wrists, her big eyes—oh, and her brave commitment to Enlightenment values—in the face of all that extremism.” The Telegraph took an even tougher line: “The tone of this feverish, self-justifying tome reminded me of a Dutch social worker I met once,” wrote Cristina Odone in a review headlined “Ayaan Hirsi Ali Reminds Me of Richard Dawkins—Obsessive and Simplistic.” “The only difference is that Hirsi Ali, unlike the frumpy, solid and sandaled social workers the world over, has made rather a lot of money out of promoting her grim philosophy.” Under Ayaan’s photo, the caption read, “Ayaan Hirsi Ali: one-track mind.”
This coolness notwithstanding, Ayaan and Ferguson announced at the Hay Festival that they were moving to England for a year. “History Man Heads Home with His Girl,” said the Daily Mail, adding that the move came “much to the chagrin of his estranged wife.” Ferguson told reporters he would be advising his friend, Britain’s new Tory prime minister David Cameron, on how British schools should teach history—as well as lecturing at the London School of Economics. Ayaan would be writing books. Ever since breaking the news of their romance, the Daily Mail had reported relentlessly on Ferguson’s previous affairs, on Ayaan’s confession to being “enormously in love,” and on her yearning to have a baby with the historian. Ayaan herself wrote an article in the Sunday Times titled “I’m a Nomad, But I Want to Be a Mother.” Ferguson’s wife was reported to be pained by what the Telegraph called Ayaan’s “excruciatingly tactless statements.” “She clearly feels no compunction,” the Telegraph said of Ayaan, “to play down her joy as Ferguson’s family attempt to adjust to their abrupt change in domestic circumstances.”
The new couple were apparently undeterred. The Daily Mail claimed that Ferguson and Ayaan had planned to hold a festive “coming out” party at the thousand-year-old castle that Douglas had renovated as a weekend retreat for the family until Douglas had scotched the idea. Ayaan and Ferguson didn’t let the media criticism stop them from dancing the night away at Hay, and Ferguson even referred to his divorce in his lecture at the festival: “Henry VIII’s marital troubles, of course, led to the Reformation. I wish my own were as productive.” Ayaan, of course, was used to controversy. Tony Allen-Mills of the Times found her “radiant.”
In early 2011, Ferguson dedicated his book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, to Ayaan. Ayaan, the historian wrote, “understands better than anyone I know what Western civilization really means and what it still has to offer the world.” Soon afterward Ayaan’s fondest wish was granted when she learned that she was pregnant with Ferguson’s child.
Chapter Thirty-seven
After Aafia’s conviction, Pakistani politicians of every stripe assailed what they called the “false U.S. justice,” and thousands of her supporters burned American flags in demonstrations across Pakistan and beyond. Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani again declared Aafia “a Daughter of the Nation” while the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, promised to keep pushing for her release.
As for the Pakistani Taliban, they vowed revenge.
The Pakistani media covered the trial but mostly passed over Aafia’s statements to the FBI about spending her missing years in hiding and being watched by the country’s intelligence agencies, to focus instead on her nebulous but sensational claims in court to have been in a secret prison. Nobody tried to find the Karachi Institute of Technology, where she had told the FBI’s Angela Sercer she had worked. And no one interviewed Abu Lubaba, who Aafia said had given her the fatwa to conduct research on unconventional weapons. (I contacted Abu Lubaba through an intermediary to see i
f he would talk with me. He replied that he didn’t meet with women. When I e-mailed questions to him, he didn’t answer them.)
Aafia’s sister, Fowzia, toured the country, leading rallies and accusing the U.S. and Pakistani governments of kidnapping and torturing Aafia and her children. Yet she failed to bring legal charges against either government. A Daily Express columnist, Mubashir Lucman, raised questions about Fowzia’s account, and soon graffiti appeared all over Karachi insulting Lucman. “It takes great courage to question Fozia [sic] Siddiqui’s certified truth,” wrote the columnist Shakil Chaudhry on the Pakistani Web site Viewpoint. “There is a mass hysteria on the Aafia Siddiqui issue in Pakistan and rationality has been totally pushed aside.”
Most disturbing was the silence over the fate of Aafia’s children. The Siddiqui family continued to waffle, sometimes saying that the boy living with them was Aafia’s son Ahmad and sometimes that he wasn’t. The politicians and journalists backing the Siddiquis never questioned this discrepancy, nor did they suggest that the boy take a DNA test to determine whether he was Amjad’s son. The Siddiquis also claimed that the two younger children were still missing. Amjad called on the U.S., Pakistani, and Afghan governments to investigate their disappearance. U.S. ambassador Anne Patterson wrote to tell him that the United States had never had custody of his children. The Pakistani and Afghan governments ignored him.
Then, in another of those weird Pakistani happenings, Fowzia and Ismat announced that they had found a twelve-year-old girl standing outside their door with a placard around her neck that had Ismat Siddiqui’s address printed on it. The Siddiquis claimed not to recognize the girl but told the press they planned to adopt her anyway. Pakistan’s Justice Ministry asked Amjad for a DNA sample; the tests showed that she was his daughter. Yet the Siddiquis refused to let him see her. A senator from the Deobandi religious party who was one of their biggest promoters told the press that the girl had been a prisoner of an American named “John” at Bagram. Once again no one asked for any evidence or proposed to find this “John.”
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