There is no new turn. Its just propagation of falsehood. A Fabrication from JehaaDi Conspiracy Theory Mill. Anybody can tape a voice and claim this is an Official of Government unless you provide name of that Official and that Official confirms this is his voice.
--- In alochona@yahoogroups.com, Isha Khan <bdmailer@...> wrote:
>
> The Siddiqui Case
> *A New Turn as Lawyers Release Explosive, Secretly Recorded Tape*
>
> By VICTORIA BRITTAIN
>
> In 2003 an MIT-educated expert in children's learning patterns, Dr Aafia
> Siddiqui, disappeared with her three children in Pakistan. Was she, as the
> Americans said, an Al Qaeda operative who in 2008 emerged after five years
> undercover, carrying a handbag full of chemicals and plans for major terror
> attacks in the US, and then attempted to shoot US soldiers? Or was she, as
> her family, and most people in Pakistan have always maintained, seized by
> Pakistani agents for reasons unknown?
>
> Now new evidence of the kidnapping of Dr Siddiqui prises open part of one of
> the most shocking of the myriad individual stories of injustice in the war
> on terror. It also underlines the recklessness and perfidy of a key United
> States' partner in the war on terror, which carries its own threat of
> explosion.
>
> Dr Siddiqui was sentenced in a New York court last year to 86 years for
> attempted murder of US soldiers in Afghanistan. Her mysterious five-year
> disappearance before that, her reappearance in Afghanistan in 2008, her
> subsequent trial in the US, and the confusion surrounding all these events,
> have made Dr Siddiqui's a symbolic case in much of the Muslim world. Now a
> senior law enforcement officer has claimed to have been involved personally
> on the day she was seized, with her three children, by Pakistani police
> agents in Karachi in March 2003 and handed over to the Pakistani
> intelligence agency, the ISI.
>
> The FBI put out a "wanted for questioning" alert for Dr Siddiqui just before
> she disappeared. She was later high on the US wanted list, with the US
> claiming that she was living undercover as an Al Qaeda agent. She was a
> "clear and present danger to the US", the then-U.S. Attorney General John
> Ashcroft said in 2004. For all these years the Pakistani government
> repeatedly denied holding her, and after her arrest in Afghanistan in 2008
> spent $2 million on US lawyers for her trial. After her conviction, the
> Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, committed himself to work for
> her return from a US prison. Dr Siddiqui had become, "the daughter of the
> nation" and the centre of a popular cause he could not afford to ignore.
>
> The new evidence, on a secretly recorded audio tape, is a potential
> earthquake in the chronically unstable political situation in Pakistan,
> where rage against the US runs deep and wide, especially as civilian
> casualties mount with the use of drone aircraft. Already the case of Aafia
> Siddiqui has periodically brought tens of thousands of people out on the
> streets in the last two and a half years in protest at what has been done to
> her by the United States' military and legal systems since she reemerged, in
> US custody and seriously wounded, in 2008. The Pakistani media have always
> claimed that the ISI was responsible for her disappearance and that the
> Americans were involved too. The tape reopens the whole question, not just
> of Dr Siddiqui, but of the corroding effect of the US alliance with
> Pakistan's military and intelligence elite in a war on terror which has had
> so many Pakistani victims. The ISI has run its own agendas, hand in glove
> with various US officials at various periods, ever since the war against the
> Soviets in Afghanistan, and then becoming godfathers of various Afghan
> factions tearing that country apart. There are plenty of astute Pakistani
> journalists with the language skills to use this tape to the utmost to
> embarrass their own security services and the government.
>
> For the US too there are questions to answer about the extensive cover-up of
> what happened to Dr Siddiqui and her three children - two of whom are US
> citizens, and appear to have spent five traumatized years separated from
> their mother and from each other, in various prisons. It is scarcely
> credible that high officials in the Bush and Obama administrations over the
> years were unaware of what their troublesome allies in Pakistan had done
> with her and her children.
>
> On April 21 2003, a "senior U.S. law enforcement official" told Lisa Myers
> of *NBC Nightly News* that Siddiqui was in Pakistani custody. The same
> source retracted the statement the next day without explanation. "At the
> time," Myers told *Harpers Magazine*, "we thought there was a possibility
> perhaps he'd spoken out of turn."
>
> According to the Associated Press, "[t]wo federal law enforcement officials,
> speaking on condition of anonymity, initially said 31-year-old Aafia
> Siddiqui recently was taken into custody by Pakistani authorities." But
> later, "the U.S. officials amended their earlier statements, saying new
> information from the Pakistani government made it `doubtful' she was in
> custody."
>
> An FBI spokesperson also formally denied that the agency had any knowledge
> of Dr. Siddiqui's whereabouts, stating that the FBI was not aware that she
> was in any nation's custody.
>
> Dr Siddiqui's mother was visited by an unknown man a few hours after her
> disappearance and warned to keep her mouth shut if she ever wanted to see
> her daughter and grandchildren again. In 2003, in a closed hearing when the
> FBI had subpoenaed some documents from Dr Siddiqui's sister, an FBI official
> confirmed to her family that she was alive and well, but would answer no
> questions on her whereabouts.
>
> The new audio evidence was secretly taped in a social situation last year;
> children can be heard in the background. It was given, unsolicited, to one
> of the many lawyers involved in Dr Siddiqui's case in the US. The source,
> whose identity has been protected, told lawyers at the International Justice
> Network that he had made the tape after a social evening when he had heard
> shocking things about Pakistani counter terrorism, about the fabrication of
> evidence, and about Dr Siddiqui's disappearance, discussed casually by a
> senior official. He felt outraged and returned for a second evening with a
> recorder and got some of the previous discussion repeated. "If it can help
> anyone I had to do it," he said to the IJN Executive Director Tina Foster
> who has represented Dr Siddiqui's family since January 2010. IJN are
> experienced hands in war on terror cases. They represent a number of
> prisoners in Bagram air base prison in Afghanistan, some of them rendered
> from Abu Ghraib, Dubai and Thailand by the CIA, as well as several
> disappeared people in Pakistan.)
>
> The witness is a Pakistani/American and he has been extensively interviewed
> by IJN's lawyers who tell me they are entirely confident of the tape's
> authenticity, the source's account and thus the identity of the prime
> subject.* *
>
> IJN's source says he was introduced by a mutual friend whose home he was
> visiting, to a man he identified to lawyers at International Justice Network
> as Imran Shaukat, the Superintendent of Police for Sindh province.
>
> A full report, and the four hour tape, in Urdu, Punjabi and English, is
> being released by the International Justice Network in the United States at
> 6am EDT Monday*, *and can be * *accessed here <http://ijnetwork.org/> and,
> here <https://sites.google.com/a/ijnetwork.org/dr-aafia-siddiqui-report/>with
> the permission of the witness. Portions of the tape concerning Dr
> Siddiqui were made available to this reporter and were independently
> translated for this article. As of midnight Sunday, EDT, this excerpt can be
> listened to here <http://ijnetwork.org/report/IJNetworkTape.WAV>.
>
> Mr Shaukat (who is voice 2 on the tape) says, "I am stationed in Karachi. I
> head the counter terrorism department for Sindh province."
>
> In the key passage in the tape for the Siddiqui case he is asked by:
>
> Voice 1 (who is the witness) "Did you arrest her?"
>
> V 2. "Yes, I arrested her. She wore glasses and a veil….. When she was
> caught she was travelling to Islamabad….She was hobnobbing with clerics. …..
>
> V 1 " So what happened after the arrest. Did ISI ask for her custody?"
>
> V 2 "Yes, we gave her to ISI"
>
> V 1 "ISI or something else?"
>
> V 2 "ISI, so we gave her to them."
>
> Mr Shaukat also describes her as "stick thin" and "a psycho", and, elsewhere
> as "not a handler, a minor facilitator" – presumably for Al Qaeda - and he
> mentions a connection to Osama Bin Laden. Asked then why couldn't she help
> them get Bin Laden, he replies, "Well, they are not fools. They wouldn't
> inform her of their forwarding address." And he says too about the children,
> "we took them with us. They were American nationals, children are American
> nationals, they were all born there."
>
> There is some discussion on the tape about the return of her daughter,
> Maryam. (Two unidentified voices are also heard.)
>
> V1: Oh, another thing. They found her daughter yesterday.
>
> V2: She's home already.
>
> V1: Yes, she's home. She speaks English only. She was in the
> prison. She is seven or eight years old. And she only speaks English.
>
> UM1: Eight years old?
>
> V1: Yeah. Children were in prison and they spoke to them in American
> English.
>
> UM1: Is she home?
>
> V1: Yeah. They got her home.
>
> V2: They were actually, I.
>
> V1: Really?
>
> V2: It's five or six months.
>
> UM2: Is she in Karachi?
>
> V1: She got home today, yesterday.
>
> V2: Well, it goes back to before I came here.
>
> V1: I read the news just yesterday, today. Maybe, in the
> night.
>
> V2: It's two or three-months old.
>
> All that has been reported in the public domain to date is that Maryam was
> returned a day or two before the recording. But, according to the childrens'
> lawyer, Tina Foster, Mr Shaukat's description is consistent with how Maryam
> was repatriated to Pakistan.
>
> Elsewhere in the tape Imran Shaukat talks about how the Pakistani police and
> ISI work to "disappear" or to use people they have taken into custody.
> According to Amina Masood Janjua at Defence for Human Rights, there are
> currently about 500 people who have disappeared in Pakistan as part of the
> "war on terror" – this does not include Sindhi and Balochi separatists.
> Part of the audio describes the doctoring or manufacturing of documents,
> creating false identities, using body doubles, with reference to various
> terrorist attacks, including Mumbai. "This is a game of double dealing,
> direct them right and exit left," Mr Shaukat says at one point.
>
> Such details are an explanation of the extraordinary litany of contradictory
> stories about Dr Siddiqui, including curious reported sightings by family
> members, that were launched into the public domain over the five years after
> her disappearance. In this John Le Carre world of ruthless manipulation of
> the vulnerable it is impossible to know how, or whether, she could have been
> used in counter terrorism's goal at the time of finding Osama Bin Laden and
> other Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.
>
> From other sources it has been established that Dr Siddiqui was separated
> from her children for the five years of her ordeal, and that the two older
> children, born in 1996 and 1998*, *were not together, but in separate
> prisons, and that the third child, Suleman who was six months old on the day
> of the disappearance, probably died then.
>
> For nearly eight years now, manufactured confusion has surrounded the
> disappearance and the subsequent whereabouts of Dr Siddiqui and her three
> children.
>
> The confusion only deepened with the second section of the story, which was
> her mysterious reappearance in 2008 in Afghanistan, and the bizarre
> circumstances of her being seriously wounded by two shots to the stomach by
> a US soldier. John Kiriakou, a retired CIA officer with extensive
> background in Al Qaeda- related work told ABC News, "I don't think we've
> captured anybody as important and as well connected as she since 2003. We
> knew that she had been planning, or at least involved in the planning of, a
> wide variety of different operations." Such statements set the tone for the
> Western media on her return under arrest to the US.
>
> Her subsequent trial in New York, ending with the 86 year sentence, is the
> third section, when, extraordinarily, Al Qaeda and terrorism were not made
> part of the case against her which was narrowly focussed on the alleged
> attempted murder incident.
>
> Dr Siddiqui's background was an unexceptional one of a highly educated young
> woman from a privileged, professional family, some of them settled in the US
> and most of them educated in the West. She spent a decade studying at
> universities in Texas, and at MIT - where she graduated in biology *summa
> cum laude* - and at Brandeis, where she took a PHD in cognitive
> neuroscience. She specialized in the science of how children learn, and in
> addition had a class teaching dyslexic children. Besides her academic work
> she lived a busy life in the Muslim community in Boston, attending cake
> sales and auctions to raise money for Muslim refugees in the Bosnian war.
> She was married to a doctor from Pakistan in a classic arranged ceremony
> conducted by phone. The couple had two children.
>
> Life in Boston soured when her marriage began to break down. There are
> reports from her professors in Boston that they saw her with bruises on her
> face. And her husband, Dr Amjad Khan, told *Harpers Magazine* reporter Petra
> Bartosiewicz in 2008 that his wife had once had to go to hospital after he
> threw a bottle at her. There are photographs of her with a deep cut across
> her face. She returned home to Pakistan in late 2001. In a brief
> reconciliation back in the US a few months later she became pregnant with
> her third child. On August 15, 2002, after an incident in which witnesses
> claim that Dr Khan pushed him, Dr. Siddiqui's father collapsed and died of a
> heart attack. A few days later, while Dr. Siddiqui was still pregnant with
> their youngest child, Suleman, Amjad Khan separated from her and immediately
> married again. Dr Khan gave custody of the children to Dr Siddiqui on
> condition they received an exclusively Islamic education
>
> Dr Khan came under FBI suspicion in May 2002 for various items purchased by
> him on the internet when the couple were living in Boston. He said they were
> for big game hunting, and he was not arrested, but both he and his wife had
> come under suspicion.
>
> In March, 2003, a global alert went out with both of them wanted for
> questioning by the FBI. A few weeks after Aafia Siddiqui disappeared, her
> husband had a four-hour interview with US and Pakistani agents, and US
> suspicions of Dr Khan were dropped. About two months later Dr Khan
> travelled to Saudi Arabia for some time.
>
> Dr Khan told *Harpers Magazine* – "The Intelligence factory – how America
> makes its enemies disappear <http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/11/0082719>",
> by CounterPunch contributor Petra Bartosiewicz - that his "contacts in the
> agencies" informed him then that Siddiqui had gone underground. He went on
> to say that he had no idea where his children were —a claim he would later
> contradict. He also told *Harpers* that he and his driver saw Siddiqui in a
> taxi in Karachi in 2005. But they did not follow her. After her arrest in
> 2008 Mr Khan told a reporter from the Pakistani daily *News* that he thought
> his former wife was an "extremist" and that of course she had been on the
> run. After Ms Bartosiewicz left Pakistan, she had an email from Dr Khan
> saying that he had received "confidential good news" from the ISI that
> Mariam and Suleman were "alive and well" with their aunt Fowzia. (In fact at
> that point one was in prison and the other was dead.)
>
> Dr Siddiqui's disappearance in March 2003 came amid a feverish whirl of
> arrests and disappearances in Pakistan, including Khaled Sheikh Mohammad,
> who has claimed to have been the master mind of 9/11, and many other Al
> Qaeda related attacks, and has been named as the killer of US journalist
> Daniel Pearl in 2002. Khaled Sheikh Mohammad was important enough to the
> Americans to be water-boarded 183 times. Shortly after Dr Siddiqui's
> disappearance, Khaled Sheikh Mohammad's nephew, Ammar Baluchi, was arrested
> in connection with 9/11. The two men were taken to Guantanamo Bay, then to
> various CIA-run secret prisons known as "black sites" for torture, before
> being returned to Guantanamo Bay.
>
> US officials then had Dr Siddiqui on an Al Qaeda "wanted" list and linked
> her to Baluchi, claiming he was her second husband. Her family, and other
> sources in Pakistan have denied the marriage, but it remains probably the
> most repeated detail about her and the one that has given her an indelible
> image as a terrorist. This was not the only lurid story about her – she was
> also alleged in a UN report to have been a courier of blood diamonds from
> Liberia for Al Qaeda with a sighting reported there in June, 2001. Her
> lawyer, Elaine Sharp stated that Dr Siddiqui had been in Boston at that time
> and she could prove it. That story died away, but the further damage to her
> reputation was done.
>
> For five years nothing sure was in the public domain about what happened to
> her and the children, though the rumours grew, turning her into a tragic
> martyr for many, or a poster for Al Qaeda ruthlessness for others . Several
> former detainees at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan claimed to have seen
> her there, while US officials quoted in Wilileaks denied she had been.
>
> A senior Pakistani journalist, Najeed Ahmed, followed the story for five
> years and reported witness testimony of someone who claimed to have been
> part of the arresting team, which he said was a joint operation with the
> FBI. (Mr Ahmed made a public statement about his research in 2009, but died
> the next day, reportedly of a heart attack.)
>
> In mid-July 2008 Pakistanti lawyers filed a *habeas corpus* for Dr Siddiqui
> in Islamabad. And within days, in Act 2 of the drama, Aafia Siddiqui
> reappeared, in Ghazni, in Afghanistan, allegedly carrying in her handbag
> chemicals, instructions for making biological weapons, and plans for
> terrorist strikes with mass casualties in the US. She was then involved in a
> shooting incident in a police station in Ghazni in which she was badly
> wounded by a US soldier. It is uncontested that she was seated behind a
> curtain in a small room, where, according to the US soldiers, one of them
> put down his gun and she came from behind the curtain, seized it and
> attempted to shoot. She says she merely looked round the curtain. None of
> the soldiers or FBI personnel present were hurt, but she was hospitalized
> with two shots in her abdomen and brought under arrest to the US.
>
> Act 3 was her trial in New York for attempted murder of soldiers and FBI
> agents with an M4 rifle, picked up from the floor near a US soldier. There
> were no charges of terrorism or Al Qaeda links.
>
> Dr Siddiqui had a tangle of high-flying legal teams, several of whom were
> not on good terms. Her first court appointed lawyer, Liz Fink, a famous New
> York political lawyer, withdrew, and the second team appointed by the court,
> was headed by Dawn Cardi, an expert in matrimonial and family law. The
> lawyers funded by the Pakistani government were led by Linda Moreno, an
> attorney with successful experiences in two high profile war on terror
> related cases, those of Professor Sami Al-Arian and Ghassan Elashi, and who
> is a Guantanamo Bay defence lawyer with security clearance. Ms Moreno is
> also known for earlier political work as one of the lawyers for the American
> Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier. Her team included Charles Swift,
> formerly a military defender of Guantanamo detainees who made a reputation
> as a critic of the Military Commission system, and Elaine Sharp.
>
> Even the narrow grounds of the case on the shooting was full of curiosities
> and contradictions: there was no physical evidence on the gun of Dr Siddiqui
> having held it, no bullet casings from it or holes in the walls of the small
> room where it took place, except from the other gun which wounded her.
> Defence counsel made two visits to Afghanistan to get the forensic evidence,
> which could, and should, have got the whole case dismissed. Linda Moreno
> described the defence forensic case as "very compelling, with no physical
> evidence whatsoever that she ever touched the gun….no DNA, no fingerprints,
> no bullets recovered, no bullet holes." The military and FBI witnesses, Ms
> Moreno said, contradicted each other, and under cross-examination even
> contradicted their own earlier stories. She went on to say that "the
> government wanted to scare the jury with stories of her alleged terrorist
> past, and steered away from the actual case."
>
> One key piece of evidence was not in the trial and only emerged from
> Wikileaks, which revealed a Defense Department report that was not released
> by the military, so was unavailable as evidence in Dr Siddiqui's defence.
> The incident report does *not* say Dr Siddiqui fired the gun she is alleged
> to have snatched and fired, merely that she "pointed" it. "Six American
> soldiers took the stand – powerful testimony for a jury. I argued, what
> happened at the front, stays at the front. The Wikileaks document would have
> added to my argument about the dubious credibility of the soldiers," Ms
> Moreno told me.
>
> Dr Siddiqui's relations with her lawyers were impossibly difficult and she
> tried repeatedly to fire them. Most never saw her except in court. Linda
> Moreno told me, "She was clearly damaged – extraordinarily frail, very
> tiny. It broke my heart when Aafia did not trust anyone, me, the other
> lawyers……although I could understand it. She reminded me of American/Indian
> resisters I worked with way back……. her resistance was clearly to the legal
> process and she saw all the attorneys as part of that process."
>
> Against the lawyers' strongest advice, Dr Siddiqui spoke in court herself.
> She said that she had been tortured, and rendered to the US, and that her
> children were also tortured in "the secret prison". The government never
> rebutted these allegations. But she lost the jury, who looked openly
> sceptical. "Sadly, she came over as sometimes arrogant and capricious, and
> sometimes rambling" according to Ms Moreno. Another observer said, "she was
> very articulate, intelligent, well-spoken, and people mistook that for well
> functioning."
>
> With so much confected fear and prejudice against her going back years, a
> media that did not hold back in its characterization of her as Al Qaeda
> Mommy, and the impact of six soldiers testifying against her, a New York
> jury's guilty verdict was probably a foregone conclusion. But Judge Berman's
> sentence that would put her away for life, was not. Ms Moreno described the
> event, "in my 30 years of trials I have never seen anything like what
> happened on sentencing day – the judge walked into court and handed out
> pre-printed power point presentations on how he had come to decide on 86
> years……."
>
> Two veteran lawyers not connected with this case, but with extensive
> experience in other cases related to the war on terror, described the
> sentence, respectively, as "extraordinary", "ridiculous….. outrageous", and
> one described the case as "absolutely full of holes." An appeal is planned.
>
> Meanwhile part of the story of the missing five years is in the heads of two
> of her three children - the two older ones who are US citizens. When they
> emerged – separately - in Pakistan, they were reunited with Dr Siddiqui's
> mother, and her sister , Fowzia, who is a Harvard-trained child psychiatrist
> and neurologist, in Karachi. They have never told their stories, but even
> the little that is known hints at the horror this family has lived through.
>
> The older one, Ahmed, then aged 12, told his aunt that he only met his
> mother the day after she was picked up in Ghazni, and that he did not
> recognize her after five years apart. Fuzzy film footage of them together
> being questioned in a press conference the day after his mother was found,
> has long circulated on the internet. This was the morning before the
> shooting incident.
>
> Ahmed remembers nothing about what happened to him next, only that he was
> visited by a US consular official in Afghanistan who told him that he was a
> US citizen. The official also told him that his brother, Suleman, was dead.
>
> Ahmed remembers being taken out of the taxi where he was with his mother and
> siblings five years before, and remembers, before he lost consciousness,
> seeing the baby, six month old Suleman, lying in the road and bleeding.
> Ahmed, told his aunt that he had been called Ali, and several other
> different names, while he was in custody, and that when he was told his name
> now was Ahmed, he knew that meant he was going to be moved again. She
> initially reported that he was suffering from PTSD and that he needed
> extensive psychological help.
>
> His sister Maryam, reappeared nearly two years later, in April 2010. She
> spoke perfect English with an American accent and no Urdu. She was simply
> dropped off outside the family home in Karachi with a note on a string
> around her neck. At some stage the Afghan prime minister Hamid Karzai was
> contacted by the family for help in getting both children back.
>
> There are very powerful vested interests that have worked to prevent Dr
> Siddiqui from ever giving an account that would be believed of what happened
> to her. The same interests are still at work trying to prevent the two
> children from ever becoming witnesses in this backstory of the war on
> terror. Late last year a kidnap attempt was made on the children, despite
> the family home being guarded by armed Pakistani police 24 hours a day. Two
> men, carrying firearms and holding big sacks, were found behind the door of
> the children's bedroom by their grandmother. The men ran off when she
> screamed, and were driven away by a waiting car nearby, before the police
> guards to the house could catch them.
>
> The release of the tape gives a lever to Pakistani public opinion and
> Pakistani opposition politicians such as Imran Khan, who have long supported
> the family, towards forcing an end to this sinister ordeal, with the return
> home of Dr Siddiqui.
>
> And there is another lever just now. Tina Foster of IJN has written to the
> Interior Minister Mr Rehman Malik, reminding him that in over a year of
> meetings he has been promising to help in Dr Siddiqui's repatriation. The
> letter says that now, when the US is demanding the return of the US
> government employee Raymond Davis, held after a shooting incident in
> Pakistan in which he is alleged to have killed two men, is the government's
> best ever chance to negotiate an exchange. The new threat by some
> congressmen to withhold aid from Pakistan if he is not returned, Hilary
> Clinton cancelling a meeting with Pakistan's foreign minister, and the
> report of possible espionage charges against Davis, ratchet up a pressure
> that could change the prospects for Dr Siddiqui.
>
> Whether Dr Siddiqui will ever be able to tell the full story of what
> happened to her over five years is another question. It is hard to imagine
> making anything close a recovery from such multiple personal and family
> trauma, in which she was isolated from every solid link with her past
> identity. Did the ISI use her, or her identity, on errands to Al Qaeda? "A
> minor facilitator", as the tape calls her? The contradictions in her own
> reported words, such as allegedly telling FBI agents while she was in a
> military hospital shot through the stomach and in restraints, that she was
> indeed married to the notorious Khaled Sheikh Mohammad's nephew Baluchi, are
> manifold, but not any guide to the truth.
>
> In her initial weeks in a US prison in Brooklyn she exhibited deeply
> disturbed behaviour such as saying she was saving her food for her children.
> Her mental state has since deteriorated and is very unpredictable, according
> to lawyer Elaine Sharp who has visited her several times. She is now
> incarcerated in solitary confinement in the Carswell Federal Medical Centre
> at Fort Worth, Texas, the only US prison medical facility for women. She has
> no contact with the outside world. Three of the four prison psychiatrists
> who interviewed her for the court said they believed she was "malingering"
> and that her mental illness was faked. But, given the record of some
> doctors' contribution to government work in the war on terror, it is hard to
> find this persuasive in the face of the known facts of her separation from
> her children in traumatic circumstances, her long isolation, and the
> documented brutal procedures of the ISI in many other cases.
>
> In the US none of the lawyers, doctors, politicians and intelligence agents
> who devised and participated in the horrors done to so many individuals as
> part of the war on terror, have paid any price in public for it. But in this
> case there is the force of public opinion in Pakistan which will demand
> nothing less than public trials of those responsible for ordering Dr
> Siddiqui's kidnapping, as well as those who carried it out, and were part of
> the vast charade that has been played with her over those years.
>
> *Victoria Brittain* is a former associate foreign editor of the Guardian.
> Her books include Hidden Lives, Hidden
> Deaths<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0041V9L5Y/counterpunchmaga>and
> Death
> of Dignity<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0865436363/counterpunchmaga>.
> She has spent much of her working life in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.
> She can be reached at victoriacatherine@...
>
> http://www.counterpunch.org/brittain02142011.html
>
------------------------------------
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