{"id":866,"date":"2010-01-27T11:13:15","date_gmt":"2010-01-27T01:13:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.khanfactor.com\/blog\/?p=866"},"modified":"2010-01-28T11:29:56","modified_gmt":"2010-01-28T01:29:56","slug":"how-america-makes-its-enemies-disappear-the-intelligence-factory-by-petra-bartosiewicz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.khanfactor.com\/blog\/?p=866","title":{"rendered":"How America Makes Its Enemies Disappear – The Intelligence Factory By PETRA BARTOSIEWICZ"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editors’ Note: This week the trial of one of the most wanted women in the war on terrorism begins in a federal courtroom in Manhattan. The defendant, Aafia Siddiqui, is a 37-year-old, MIT-educated neuroscientist and suspected Al Qaeda operative. Siddiqui lived in the U.S. for ten years before mysteriously vanishing from her hometown in Karachi in 2003, along with her three children, two of whom are American born. By some accounts she is Al Qaeda royalty, having allegedly married Ammar al Baluchi, who is the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and one of the five accused 9\/11 plotters expected to face trial in the same courthouse as Siddiqui herself. But human rights groups say Siddiqui is no extremist and have long suspected foul play in her disappearance. They believe she was detained and illegally interrogated by Pakistani intelligence at the behest of the U.S. The issue of U.S. complicity in “enforced disappearances” has received little media attention, but the practice begun under Bush has continued apace in the Obama administration. Overseas intelligence gathering is increasingly outsourced to amenable foreign regimes who act as interrogators on our behalf, detaining and torturing the “truth” out of sources who often don’t have much to offer. The practice is a blatant violation of human rights and in the worst instances nothing less than torture by proxy.\u00a0Opening statements in Siddiqui’s trial begin Jan. 19. We have reprinted here an investigation into her case, “The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes its Enemies Disappear,” by freelance journalist Petra Bartosiewicz. The article first appeared in the November 2009 issue of Harper’s magazine. A PDF version is also available at www.harpers.org.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I first read the U.S. government\u2019s complaint against Aafia Siddiqui, who is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn detention center on charges of attempting to murder a group of U.S. Army officers and FBI agents in Afghanistan, the case it described was so impossibly convoluted\u2014and yet so absurdly incriminating\u2014that I simply assumed she was innocent. According to the complaint, on the evening of July 17, 2008, several local policemen discovered Siddiqui and a young boy loitering about a public square in Ghazni. She was carrying instructions for creating \u201cweapons involving biological material,\u201d descriptions of U.S. \u201cmilitary assets,\u201d and numerous unnamed \u201cchemical substances in gel and liquid form that were sealed in bottles and glass jars.\u201d Siddiqui, an MIT-trained neuroscientist who lived in the United States for eleven years, had vanished from her hometown in Pakistan in 2003, along with all three of her children, two of whom were U.S. citizens. The complaint does not address where she was those five years or why she suddenly decided to emerge into a public square outside Pakistan and far from the United States, nor does it address why she would do so in the company of her American son. Various reports had her married to a high-level Al Qaeda operative, running diamonds out of Liberia for Osama bin Laden, and abetting the entry of terrorists into the United States. But those reports were countered by rumors that Siddiqui actually had spent the previous five years in the maw of the U.S. intelligence system\u2014that she was a ghost prisoner, kidnapped by Pakistani spies, held in secret detention at a U.S. military prison, interrogated until she could provide no further intelligence, then spat back into the world in the manner most likely to render her story implausible. These dueling narratives of terrorist intrigue and imperial overreach were only further confounded when Siddiqui finally appeared before a judge in a Manhattan courtroom on August 5. Now, two weeks after her capture, she was bandaged and doubled over in a wheelchair, barely able to speak, because\u2014somehow\u2014she had been shot in the stomach by one of the very soldiers she stands accused of attempting to murder.<\/p>\n

It is clear that the CIA and the FBI believed Aafia Siddiqui to be a potential source of intelligence and, as such, a prized commodity in the global war on terror. Every other aspect of the Siddiqui case, though, is shrouded in rumor and denial, with the result that we do not know, and may never know, whether her detention has made the United States any safer. Even the particulars of the arrest itself, which took place before a crowd of witnesses near Ghazni\u2019s main mosque, are in dispute. According to the complaint, Siddiqui was detained not because she was wanted by the FBI but simply because she was loitering in a \u201csuspicious\u201d manner; she did not speak the local language and she was not escorted by an adult male. What drove her to risk such conspicuous behavior has not been revealed. When I later hired a local reporter in Afghanistan to re-interview several witnesses, the arresting officer, Abdul Ghani, said Siddiqui had been carrying \u201ca box with some sort of chemicals,\u201d but a shopkeeper named Farhad said the police had found only \u201ca lot of papers.\u201d Hekmat Ullah, who happened to be passing by at the time of her arrest, said Siddiqui \u201cwas attacking everyone who got close to her\u201d\u2014a detail that is not mentioned in the complaint. A man named Mirwais, who had come to the mosque that day to pray, said he saw police handcuff Siddiqui, but Massoud Nabizada, the owner of a local pharmacy, said the police had no handcuffs, \u201cso they used her scarf to tie her hands.\u201d What everyone appears to agree on is this: an unknown person called the police to warn that a possible suicide bomber was loitering outside a mosque; the police arrested Siddiqui and her son; and, Afghan sovereignty notwithstanding, they then dispatched the suspicious materials, whatever they were, to the nearest U.S. military base.<\/p>\n

The events of the following day are also subject to dispute. According to the complaint, a U.S. Army captain and a warrant officer, two FBI agents, and two military interpreters came to question Siddiqui at Ghazni\u2019s police headquarters. The team was shown to a meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain. \u201cNone of the United States personnel were aware,\u201d the complaint states, \u201cthat Siddiqui was being held, unsecured, behind the curtain.\u201d No explanation is offered as to why no one thought to look behind it. The group sat down to talk and, in another odd lapse of vigilance, \u201cthe Warrant Officer placed his United States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next to the curtain, near his right foot.\u201d Siddiqui, like a villain in a stage play, reached from behind the curtain and pulled the three-foot rifle to her side. She unlatched the safety. She pulled the curtain \u201cslightly back\u201d and pointed the gun directly at the head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her. He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, \u201cGet the fuck out of here!\u201d and fired twice. She hit no one. As the interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant officer drew his sidearm and fired \u201capproximately two rounds\u201d into Siddiqui\u2019s abdomen. She collapsed, still struggling, then fell unconscious.<\/p>\n

The authorities in Afghanistan describe a different series of events. The governor of Ghazni Province, Usman Usmani, told my local reporter that the U.S. team had \u201cdemanded to take over custody\u201d of Siddiqui. The governor refused. He could not release Siddiqui, he explained, until officials from the counterterrorism department in Kabul arrived to investigate. He proposed a compromise: the U.S. team could interview Siddiqui, but she would remain at the station. In a Reuters interview, however, a \u201csenior Ghazni police officer\u201d suggested that the compromise did not hold. The U.S. team arrived at the police station, he said, and demanded custody of Siddiqui, the Afghan officers refused, and the U.S. team proceeded to disarm them. Then, for reasons unexplained, Siddiqui herself somehow entered the scene. The U.S. team, \u201cthinking that she had explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber, shot her and took her.\u201d<\/p>\n

Siddiqui\u2019s own version of the shooting is less complicated. As she explained it to a delegation of Pakistani senators who came to Texas to visit her in prison a few months after her arrest, she never touched anyone\u2019s gun, nor did she shout at anyone or make any threats. She simply stood up to see who was on the other side of the curtain and startled the soldiers. One of them shouted, \u201cShe is loose,\u201d and then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness she heard someone else say, \u201cWe could lose our jobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

Siddiqui\u2019s trial is scheduled for this November. The charges against her stem solely from the shooting incident itself, not from any alleged act of terrorism. The prosecutors provide no explanation for how a scientist, mother, and wife came to be charged as a dangerous felon. Nor do they account for her missing years, or her two other children, who still are missing. What is known is that the United States wanted her in 2003, and it wanted her again in 2008, and now no one can explain why.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

As the \u201cglobal war on terror\u201d enters its ninth year, under the leadership of its second commander in chief, certain ongoing assumptions have gained the force of common wisdom. One of them, as Barack Obama explained in a major policy speech last May, is that we have entered a \u201cnew era\u201d that will \u201cpresent new challenges to our application of the law\u201d and require \u201cnew tools to protect the American people.\u201d Another, as Obama made clear in the same speech, is that the purpose of these new tools and laws is \u201cto prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out.\u201d These positions are appealing, but they fail to address what might be thought of as an underlying economic disequilibrium. The continued political appetite for a global war on terror has led to a commodification of \u201cactionable intelligence,\u201d which is a product, chiefly, of human prisoners like Aafia Siddiqui. Because this war, by definition, has no physical or temporal boundaries, the demand for such intelligence has no limit. But the world contains a relatively small number of terrorists and an even smaller number of terrorist plots. Our demand for intelligence far outstrips the supply of prisoners. Where the United States itself has been unable to meet that demand, therefore, it has embraced a solution that is the essence of globalization. We outsource the work to countries, like Pakistan, whose political circumstances allow them to produce prisoners with far greater efficiency.<\/p>\n

What the CIA and the FBI understand as an acquisition solution, however, others see as a human-rights debacle. Just as thousands of political dissidents, suspected criminals, and enemies of the state were \u201cdisappeared\u201d from Latin America over the course of several decades of CIA-funded dirty wars, so too have hundreds of \u201cpersons of interest\u201d around the world begun to disappear as a consequence of the global war on terror, which in many ways has become a globalized version of those earlier, regional failures of democracy.<\/p>\n

Many individual cases are well known. Binyam Mohamed, an alleged conspirator in Jose Padilla\u2019s now debunked \u201cdirty bomb plot,\u201d was arrested in Karachi in 2002 and flown by the CIA to Morocco, where he was tortured for eighteen months. He eventually emerged into the non-covert prison system, as a detainee at Guant\u00e1namo, and was released earlier this year without charge. Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was arrested at New York City\u2019s John F. Kennedy Airport in 2002 while on his way home from a vacation, flown by the CIA to a Syrian prison, held in a coffin-size cell for nearly a year, and then released, also without charges. Saud Memon, a Pakistani businessman rumored to own the plot of land where the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was murdered, was arrested in 2003, held by the United States at an unknown location until 2006, then \u201creleased\u201d to Pakistan, where in April 2007 he finally emerged, badly beaten and weighing just eighty pounds, on the doorstep of his Karachi home. He died a few weeks later.<\/p>\n

The total number of men and women who have been kidnapped and imprisoned for U.S. intelligence-gathering purposes is difficult to determine. Apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, the main theaters of combat, Pakistan is our primary source of publicly known detainees\u2014researchers at Seton Hall University estimated in 2006 that two thirds of the prisoners at Guant\u00e1namo were arrested in Pakistan or by Pakistani authorities\u2014and so it is reasonable to assume that the country is also a major supplier of ghost detainees. Human Rights Watch has tracked enforced disappearances in Pakistan since before 2001. The group\u2019s counterterrorism director, Joanne Mariner, told me that the number of missing persons in the country grew \u201cto a flood\u201d as U.S. counterterrorism operations peaked between 2002 and 2004. In that same three-year period, U.S. aid to Pakistan totaled $4.7 billion, up from $9.1 million in the three years prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Correlation does not prove causation, of course, but Pakistan\u2019s former president, Pervez Musharraf, did claim in his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire, that his country had delivered 369 Al Qaeda suspects to the United States for \u201cmillions of dollars\u201d in bounties (a boast he neatly elides in the Urdu edition). It is reasonable to suspect this figure is on the low side.<\/p>\n

One reason estimates are so inconclusive, of course, is that the business of disappearance is inherently ambiguous. Missing-person reports filed in Pakistan rarely claim that the detained individual was picked up by the CIA or the FBI. Instead, the detainee is almost always arrested by \u201ccity police\u201d or \u201ccivilian clothed men\u201d or unidentified \u201csecret agency personnel\u201d who arrive in \u201cunmarked vehicles.\u201d The secretary-general of the Pakistani NGO Human Rights Commission, Ibn Abdur Rehman, described the process. \u201cA man is picked up at his house, brought to the police station,\u201d he said. \u201cThe family comes with him and are told, \u2018He\u2019ll be released in an hour, go home.\u2019 They come back in an hour and are told, \u2018Sorry, he\u2019s been handed off to the intelligence people and taken to Islamabad.\u2019 After that, the individual is never heard from again. When the family tries to file a missing-person report, the police won\u2019t take it, and no one admits to having custody of the person.\u201d Some of the disappeared pass directly to U.S. custody and reappear months or years later at Guant\u00e1namo or Bagram air base. Others remain captives of Pakistan\u2019s multiple intelligence agencies or are shipped to places like Uzbekistan, whose torture policies are well known. Others simply vanish, their fate revealed only by clerical errors, or when they turn up dead.<\/p>\n

Most of the arrests and detentions take place under the auspices of Pakistan\u2019s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which the CIA helped expand in the 1980s largely in order to wage a proxy war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan (where the ISI continues to wield considerable influence). The agency has evolved into a powerful institution with its own agendas and alliances\u2014it has long pursued ethnic separatists in the Baluchistan region, for instance, where the Human Rights Commission estimates that at least 600 individuals have disappeared\u2014and the result is that the CIA itself often has little knowledge of the provenance or purpose of a given arrest.<\/p>\n

Such may be the case with Siddiqui. To my knowledge, the only current or former U.S. official to comment publicly on the significance of her capture was John Kiriakou, a retired CIA officer who gained notoriety in 2007 when he told ABC News that the CIA waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda lieutenant, produced life-saving intelligence in less than a minute. Although Justice Department memos later revealed that Zubaydah was waterboarded eighty-three times, Kiriakou\u2019s comments did much to foster acceptance of the practice among the American public\u2014and his description of Siddiqui seemed calibrated to achieve a similar effect. In 2008 he told ABC News, which had hired him as a consultant after his waterboarding interview, \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ve 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.\u201d When I called Kiriakou to ask him about those operations, though, he said the extent of his knowledge was that Siddiqui\u2019s name \u201chad popped up an awful lot\u201d while he was in Pakistan searching for Zubaydah in 2002, and that \u201cthe FBI talked about her so often that I thought she must be a big fish.\u201d After he left Pakistan, he forgot all about Siddiqui until ABC called for an interview. \u201cI actually had to Google as to remember who she was,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Last spring, in the hope that I might discover how Siddiqui became such a sought-after commodity, I took the eighteen-hour flight from New York to Karachi. Pakistan\u2019s cities are like many in the Third World: overwhelmed with humanity, underserved by government, and ruled by a wealthy elite who cultivate an atmosphere of lawless entitlement. The current president, Asif Ali Zardari, widower of slain former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, was once charged with (though not tried for) attempting to extort a Pakistani businessman by strapping a remote-controlled bomb to the man\u2019s leg. My host in Karachi, a friend of a friend, was a charming fashion designer and gun aficionado who also happened to be a bona-fide feudal lord. The day after my arrival, as one of his servants massaged his neck, he explained to me that he could have the subjects on his lands killed, though I had the impression that he would consider such an act gauche.<\/p>\n

Siddiqui\u2019s own family is well known in Karachi. They are religiously conservative, but also, in certain respects, \u201cWestern.\u201d Siddiqui\u2019s father, who died in 2002, was a doctor educated in England. Her brother is an architect in Houston; her sister, now one of Pakistan\u2019s premier neurologists, received her training at Harvard. Siddiqui herself attended MIT as an undergraduate, and earned her doctorate in neuroscience at Brandeis. Her education, and the privilege it implies, is part of what made her disappearance so newsworthy. Families like hers are understood to have enough connections, or at least enough hired guards, to prevent their members from being kidnapped, even by the government.<\/p>\n

The national press nonetheless seems to take for granted that Siddiqui and her children were abducted by Pakistani intelligence in 2003, most likely at the behest of the United States. Almost no one I spoke to in Karachi believed she could have remained underground and undetected by the ISI for five days, let alone five years. But there was one important exception. A few days before I arrived, Siddiqui\u2019s ex-husband, Amjad Khan, told a reporter from the Pakistani daily News that he thought she was an \u201cextremist\u201d and that of course she had been on the run. This so infuriated Siddiqui\u2019s sister, Fowzia, that she later called a press conference of her own and told reporters Khan was an abusive husband and father, and that if anyone was an extremist it was him.<\/p>\n

Khan now lives in Karachi with his new wife and their two children, in the well-appointed home of his father, a retired businessman. He is thirty-nine years old, tall and slender, and when we met he was wearing the long beard that denotes his strict devotion to Islam. He invited me into the drawing room and signaled a servant to bring cookies and cold glasses of lassi, a yogurt drink. Khan came to know Siddiqui, he said, in 1993. She was an active supporter of Islamic causes at MIT, and during a visit to Karachi, Khan\u2019s mother arranged for her to come to their home and give a talk on the plight of Bosnian Muslims. After the talk, Khan\u2019s mother, presumably impressed, asked him if he liked what he saw. He said yes, and the parents arranged a wedding. The ceremony took place over the phone while Khan was in Karachi and Siddiqui already back in Boston, but Khan, who had studied medicine in Pakistan, soon followed her and took a research position at Massachusetts General Hospital.<\/p>\n

Khan said he loved Siddiqui in the early years of their marriage but that the relationship was always somewhat volatile; he casually described an incident in which he threw a baby bottle at Siddiqui\u2019s face and she had to go to the hospital to get stitches. The marriage began to unravel, he said, after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Siddiqui, shaken by the U.S. reaction to the attacks, flew with the children to Karachi soon after, and when Khan joined them in November, he says, Siddiqui\u2019s \u201cextreme nature\u201d became apparent. She wanted him to go with her to Afghanistan to serve as a medic for the mujahedeen. When he refused, he said, \u201cshe became hysterical. She started pounding on my chest with her fists. She openly asked for a divorce in front of my family.\u201d Khan\u2019s parents urged him to return to Boston without Siddiqui, to complete his board exams, which he did. In January 2002, he convinced Siddiqui to return to Boston, where they patched things up sufficiently that Siddiqui became pregnant with their third child.<\/p>\n

Then, in June 2002, the couple received a visit from the FBI. The agents said they were following up on a suspicious-activity report from Fleet Bank in Boston. Why had someone at the Saudi embassy in Washington wired $70,000 to accounts linked to their address? And why had Khan recently purchased night-vision goggles, body armor, and, according to Khan, as many as seventy military manuals, among them Fugitive, Advanced Fugitive, and How to Make C-4? \u201cI asked the FBI,\u201d he said, \u201cwhether I should return some of the objectionable books, and the agent replied, \u2018No, we are a free country. You are free to read these books.\u2019\u201d Khan told me that the \u201cnight-vision goggles\u201d were actually just a single night-vision scope for his hunting rifle; the \u201cbody armor\u201d was a bulletproof vest for his uncle, a big-game hunter in Karachi. The $70,000 was not for them. It had been sent to a Saudi man who sublet Khan\u2019s first Boston apartment in 2001 after the couple had moved to another place\u2014the money was to pay for medical treatment for his son. And the military manuals, Khan explained, less convincingly, were an appeasement gift for Siddiqui. \u201cBy that time I knew the marriage wasn\u2019t going to last,\u201d he said. \u201cBut I had my exams coming up and needed to keep things neutral.\u201d<\/p>\n

The arguments continued, however, and in the end it was Khan who, in August 2002, finally demanded a divorce. The parting was quite bitter, and perhaps not entirely because of Siddiqui\u2019s purported radical proclivities. Even before the divorce was finalized that October, Khan had contracted a marriage with his current wife, an act that Siddiqui, according to divorce papers her sister gave me, said was done \u201cwithout her consent or prior knowledge.\u201d And although Khan said he offered to pay child support and sought to see the children, the divorce papers note that he gave up permanent custody and would \u201chave no right of any nature with the children.\u201d He has never seen his son, Suleman, who was born that September.<\/p>\n

Khan said he learned that Siddiqui was missing only when the FBI issued an alert in March 2003, five months after the divorce was finalized, seeking both of them for questioning. He told me he cleared his own name several weeks later in a four-hour joint interview with the FBI and the ISI, and that his \u201ccontacts in the agencies\u201d informed him that Siddiqui had gone underground. He had no idea where his children were, he said\u2014a claim he would later contradict. He said he and his driver saw Siddiqui in a taxi in Karachi in 2005. But they did not follow her.<\/p>\n

As we talked, Khan\u2019s father came and sat down and soon began answering questions for his son, who deferred to him. Eventually the father decided the interview had gone on long enough, and so Khan walked me outside, where his two young daughters from his second marriage were playing on the lawn. One was named Mariam, the same name as his daughter with Siddiqui. I asked if he had given up on the possibility of the first Mariam coming home. Khan shrugged and said he just liked the name.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Fowzia lives in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, an affluent enclave of palm trees and high-walled compounds not far from Amjad Khan\u2019s home. When I called, she was about to hold her press conference and told me to come right over. \u201cI got a video of the prison strip search,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s really gruesome.\u201d<\/p>\n

I knew Siddiqui had been searched when she left her holding cell for preliminary hearings. She was still recovering from her gunshot wounds and had found the process, which included a cavity search, to be humiliating and extremely painful. I assumed Fowzia had somehow acquired a tape of the search. Images of a devout Muslim woman being stripped in the presence of Western prison guards would be offensive and inflammatory, and thus newsworthy, and could help Fowzia gain sympathy for her sister\u2019s cause.<\/p>\n

Several TV satellite trucks were idling outside the house when I arrived, and in the living room three dozen reporters were watching the video, which Fowzia played on her laptop computer. I leaned in to get a better look and saw that it was indeed a strip search. But the woman was not Siddiqui. The video, taken from a U.S. television report on an entirely unrelated case, was meant to depict what Fowzia\u2019s sister might have gone through\u2014not an outright deception but a well-timed ploy to shift attention away from the damaging claims of an angry ex-husband.<\/p>\n

After the reporters left, we sat down to discuss the case in greater detail. Fowzia kept steering the conversation away from questions about her sister\u2019s culpability and the whereabouts of her niece and nephew. Instead, she wanted to discuss Khan\u2019s perfidy. \u201cHe\u2019s on a lying spree,\u201d she said. \u201cLet him continue!\u201d Fowzia speculated that Khan was inventing tales about Siddiqui in order to save himself from prosecution, that he was a criminal who had been turned into an informant, that he could be trusted by no one. I asked her what proof she had that Khan had been involved in terrorist activities. She said she had none. But he certainly held extremist views, she said, and as evidence she produced a copy of the couple\u2019s divorce agreement and directed me to a proviso that Khan had inserted: \u201cUnder no circumstances would the children be admitted in any of the schools which render education in Western style or culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fowzia\u2019s resignation about the missing children puzzled me, as had Khan\u2019s. When I asked her about it, she said, \u201cI\u2019ve coped by assuming the kids are dead.\u201d A few years ago, she explained, a Pakistani intelligence agent had come to her house and told her that Suleman, who had been born prematurely and was sick at the time Aafia disappeared, had died in custody. I asked her who the agent was, but she said he refused to give his name. (After I left Pakistan, Khan emailed me to say he had received \u201cconfidential good news\u201d from the ISI that Mariam and Suleman were \u201calive and well\u201d with Fowzia. When I asked if he could tell me more, he wrote back that he possessed \u201ca lot of detailed information\u201d about his children and implied they had been with the Siddiqui family all along, but he refused to provide any of that information \u201cbecause I was forbidden by the agencies\/my lawyer to do so for my own safety.\u201d Fowzia says she still has not seen the children.)<\/p>\n

On my way out of Fowzia\u2019s house, I passed a boy who was watching television. It was Siddiqui\u2019s eldest son, Ahmad, now twelve years old. After his arrest at the market in Afghanistan he had again vanished, and for a month U.S. authorities denied any knowledge of his whereabouts. In fact, he had been turned over to an Afghan intelligence agency, which held him for six weeks and finally sent him to Pakistan to live with his aunt. I waved to Ahmad. He said hello and then went back to the Bollywood film he was watching. \u201cHe hasn\u2019t talked in great detail about where he was,\u201d Fowzia said. \u201cHe tries to figure out what answer you want him to give and he gives that answer.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

What most of us understand as human relationships, infinitely varied and poignant with ambiguity, criminal investigators understand simply as a series of associations. The mapping of \u201cknown associates\u201d is an old and powerful investigative technique. But within the context of the global war on terror, the technique\u2014known variously as \u201csocial-network analysis,\u201d \u201clink analysis,\u201d or \u201ccontact chaining\u201d\u2014has been used less for solving crimes and more for preventing them. Using large computer arrays and the kind of automated data analysis that already dominate the world of global finance, investigators cobble together every scrap of available information in order to create what they hope is a picture not of a single true past but of an infinite variety of theoretical futures. In such a system, the universe of possible associations\u2014and therefore the universe of possible detainees\u2014also becomes unlimited. When the FBI detained more than a thousand Muslim immigrants in 2001, for instance, it provided judges at secret detention hearings an affidavit explaining that \u201cthe business of counterterrorism intelligence gathering in the United States is akin to the construction of a mosaic\u201d and that evidence \u201cthat may seem innocuous at first glance\u201d might ultimately \u201cfit into a picture that will reveal how the unseen whole operates.\u201d The FBI reasoned that even the possessors of this intelligence might not be aware of the significance of what they knew, and so they could be detained simply because the agency was \u201cunable to rule out\u201d their value.<\/p>\n

It was precisely such a mosaic, in which none of the myriad connections were quite intelligible but all were laden with vague significance, that set off alarms at the FBI and CIA in the months leading up to the moment Siddiqui disappeared in 2003. In early 2002, the FBI became aware of a United Nations investigation into Al Qaeda financing that mentioned Siddiqui. A \u201cconfidential source\u201d claimed he had \u201cpersonally met\u201d her in Liberia, where she was on a mission to \u201cevaluate diamond operations\u201d for her Al Qaeda bosses in Pakistan. Dennis Lormel, an FBI agent who was investigating terrorism financing at the time, told me the agency quickly debunked this specific claim. Nonetheless, the notion that Siddiqui was involved in money laundering had entered the picture.<\/p>\n

Then, in late December 2002, two months after her divorce, Siddiqui flew from Pakistan to the United States, where she had a job interview at a hospital in Baltimore. On December 30, she made her way to nearby Gaithersburg, Maryland, and opened a post office box. She listed as a co-owner of the box a man named Majid Khan, whom she falsely identified as her husband. According to court records, the FBI began to monitor the box almost immediately.<\/p>\n

On March 1, 2003, intelligence agents in Pakistan arrested Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged operational planner of the September 11 attacks. U.S. interrogators quickly elicited from him the names of dozens of possible co-conspirators. Among them was Majid Khan. Mohammed said he had assigned Khan to deliver \u201ca large sum of money\u201d to Al Qaeda.<\/p>\n

On March 5, the ISI arrested Khan, along with his pregnant wife. According to a statement by Khan\u2019s father, \u201cU.S. and Pakistani agents, including FBI agents,\u201d interrogated his son for at least three weeks at a secret detention center in Karachi. What Khan told his captors is not publicly known, but by March 18 the FBI was alarmed enough to issue a bulletin seeking Siddiqui and her ex-husband for questioning.<\/p>\n

On March 28, FBI agents in New York City detained a twenty-three-year-old man named Uzair Paracha, who had just arrived there from Pakistan to help his father sell units of a beachfront property in Karachi. His father also owned an import\/export business in Manhattan, and Paracha worked from an office there. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had planned to use the company, he told investigators, \u201cto smuggle explosives into the United States.\u201d Among the first questions agents in New York asked Paracha was whether he knew Majid Khan. He said he did. And there was more: he also had the key to his post office box.<\/p>\n

At some point that same month, Siddiqui disappeared. Her family would not, or could not, give me a specific date. The last traces of her I found came from news accounts. On March 28, the day the FBI detained Paracha, the Pakistani daily Dawn reported that local authorities took Siddiqui \u201cto an undisclosed location\u201d for questioning and that \u201cFBI agents were also allowed to question the lady.\u201d Three weeks later, on April 21, a \u201csenior U.S. law enforcement official\u201d told Lisa Myers of NBC Nightly News that Siddiqui was in Pakistani custody. The same source retracted the statement the next day without explanation. \u201cAt the time,\u201d Myers told me, \u201cwe thought there was a possibility perhaps he\u2019d spoken out of turn.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was one final association to take into account. On April 29, the Pakistani authorities arrested Ammar al Baluchi, a computer technician they suspected was plotting to bomb the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. Baluchi was the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The FBI and the CIA suspected that he had provided the 9\/11 hijackers with almost a quarter of their financing. They had also come to believe, as was later reported in an undated Department of Defense \u201cdetainee biography,\u201d that Baluchi had \u201cmarried Siddiqui shortly before his detention.\u201d<\/p>\n

The means by which we assemble such intelligence have become more sophisticated and also more violent. During his initial month of detention, Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. Khan\u2019s father claims that his son was forced \u201cto sign a statement that he was not even allowed to read,\u201d and Khan later attempted suicide, twice, by chewing through an artery in his arm.<\/p>\n

The interrogations yielded a great deal of data, but it is unclear how useful any of that data actually was. Mohammed later said, \u201cI gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear.\u201d Paracha told many contradictory stories, and Baluchi, who had maintained his innocence during his U.S. military tribunal hearing, later filed a statement saying, in effect, that he was proud of his involvement in the September 11 attacks.<\/p>\n

The roles Siddiqui and Paracha played in the post-office-box affair may have been entirely innocent. Majid Khan said at his own military tribunal hearings that his travel documents had expired while he was in Karachi and he wanted to renew them. He asked his friend Baluchi to enlist Siddiqui and Paracha to help maintain the ruse that he was still in the United States by establishing a mailing address. Khan and Baluchi both contended at Paracha\u2019s trial that he was ignorant of their ties to Al Qaeda.<\/p>\n

Such intelligence may actually be worse than useless. In a 2006 Harvard study of the efficacy of preemptive national-security practices, Jessica Stern and Jonathan Wiener note that \u201ctaking action based only on worst-case thinking can introduce unforeseen dangers and costs\u201d and propose that \u201ca better approach to managing risk involves an assessment of the full portfolio of risks\u2014those reduced by the proposed intervention, as well as those increased.\u201d Rather than understanding all intelligence as actionable, they write, \u201cdecision makers\u201d should create \u201cmechanisms to ensure that sensible risk analysis precedes precautionary actions.\u201d At the moment, no such mechanisms appear to exist. The leader of one FBI conterterrorism squad recently told the New York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads its twenty-one agents had pursued over the past five years, just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an actual terrorist plot. But the gathering of intelligence continues apace.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

As I traveled from Karachi to Lahore to Islamabad, questioning family members, lawyers, and spies, I heard every possible story about Aafia Siddiqui. She was a well-known extremist. She was an innocent victim. She was an informant working for the United States or Pakistan or both sides at once. Most people continued to believe that she had been arrested by someone in 2003, but it was proving impossible to determine who actually apprehended her, or who ordered the arrest, or why. I interviewed an attorney in Lahore who swore he had seen a cell-phone video of the arrest that showed what he believed was a female CIA officer slapping Siddiqui across the face. And as to her whereabouts before the arrest, the most persistent account\u2014that she was held by the U.S. military in Bagram prison in Afghanistan\u2014emerged from the testimony of two former detainees, one of whom, Moazzam Begg, was not even at Bagram during the years Siddiqui was missing.<\/p>\n

One afternoon in Islamabad I met a recently retired senior Pakistani intelligence officer who had promised, if I agreed not to name him, to answer all of my questions. We spoke at his home, a gated mansion in one of the city\u2019s wealthiest precincts. He had silver hair and a silver mustache, and he wore a gold pinky ring fitted with a large green stone. When I called to arrange the interview, he initially said he did not know why Siddiqui had disappeared. But he had since then contacted a friend at one of Pakistan\u2019s intelligence agencies, \u201ca very good chap\u201d who had been \u201cpretty senior in the hierarchy\u201d when Siddiqui disappeared in 2003. Now, over the customary drinks and cookies, the retired intelligence officer recounted their conversation, the upshot of which was that Siddiqui had in fact been picked up by Pakistani intelligence and delivered to \u201cthe friends,\u201d which was shorthand, he said, for the CIA.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou people didn\u2019t have the decency to tell me she\u2019d been picked up?\u201d he\u2019d asked his colleague, referring to the jurisdictional problems that plague intelligence agencies around the world. \u201cNo, no, it was very sudden,\u201d the colleague replied. \u201cThe friends, they were insisting.\u201d My host told me that such insistence was irritating and disrespectful. \u201cIt was very difficult, very embarrassing for us to turn her over to you,\u201d he said. \u201cThe decision was made at the highest levels. Bush and Musharraf likely would have known about it. After two to three days, we passed her along to the CIA.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time our meeting ended, I was convinced that I had heard the definitive account if not of Siddiqui\u2019s reappearance then at least of her disappearance\u2014until, after a fifteen-minute taxi ride later to a less fashionable neighborhood, I arrived at the home of Siddiqui\u2019s elderly maternal uncle, Shams ul Hassan Faruqi, a geologist. As we sat in his home office, surrounded by maps and drawings of rock strata, Faruqi told an entirely different story. He said Siddiqui showed up at his house unannounced one evening in January 2008, a time when, according to the intelligence officer I had just left, she was supposedly in the hands of the CIA. Her face had been altered, Faruqi said, as if she had undergone plastic surgery, but he knew her by her voice. She said she had been held by the Pakistanis and the Americans and was now running operations for both of them against Al Qaeda. She had slipped away for a few days, though, because she wanted him to smuggle her across the border into Afghanistan so she could seek sanctuary with the Taliban, members of which Faruqi had known from his years of mineral exploration.<\/p>\n

A few days later I heard yet another account, this one from Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani reporter who has been writing about the Taliban and the ISI for thirty years. As I interviewed him, we were joined by his three golden Labradors, who had just been shaved bare to make the heat more tolerable for them. Rashid told me that he, too, had heard from his sources that the Pakistanis had picked up Siddiqui. But instead of handing her directly to the CIA, they hung on to her. \u201cIt\u2019s possible there were some conditions being laid for her being released which the Americans didn\u2019t want to meet. So we held her for a long time,\u201d he said. \u201cI think she was used as a bargaining chip for something completely different which we were pissed off about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most believable account came from Ali Hasan, senior South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, whom I visited at his home in Lahore. \u201cMy professional view,\u201d he said, \u201cis they\u2019re all lying. Siddiqui\u2019s family is lying, the husband is lying, the Pakistanis are lying, the Americans are lying, for all I know the kids are lying. And because they\u2019re all lying the truth is probably twenty times stranger than we all know.\u201d<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

One of the chief conveniences of outsourcing is that certain costs are externalized. Pollution, for instance, is expensive. Manufacturers that pollute in the United States are required to bear its cost by paying a fine. If they outsource to a country where the cost of the pollution is borne directly by the people, they make more money. Such a transfer is obviously desirable from the point of view of the manufacturer, but it often generates political unrest in the host country, for reasons that are equally obvious. This phenomenon applies as well when the external cost of manufacturing intelligence is paid in freedom. The governments that did the outsourced work of U.S. intelligence agencies in previous dirty wars\u2014in Argentina and Chile, Guatemala and Uruguay\u2014eventually were toppled by popular protest, in large part because the people became aware that their leaders had profited from their suffering. Pakistanis today appear no less aware that this type of transaction is occurring in their country. Indeed, a recent poll found that the only nation they find more threatening than India, whose nuclear missiles point directly at them, is the United States. And they have begun to hold their leaders accountable for the association.<\/p>\n

The rising number of disappearances became a decisive political issue in 2007, after Pakistan\u2019s Supreme Court, under its chief justice, Iftikhar Chaudhry, opened hearings on behalf of the missing, demanding that they appear before the court. This initiative turned up the locations of 186 disappeared persons, many of whom were found in known Pakistani detention centers, including Imran Munir, a Malaysian of Pakistani origin who had been missing since 2006. During Munir\u2019s hearing, it came to light that Pakistani security agents had continued trying to hide him even after the court demanded his presence. Chaudhry\u2019s efforts to locate the disappeared were met with considerable resistance from the government. In March 2007, the chief justice himself was summoned to appear before Musharraf, where, with ISI and military chiefs present, he was ordered to resign. Chaudhry refused, and so Musharraf charged him with misconduct and suspended him from office.<\/p>\n

In July 2007, a panel of thirteen judges reinstated Chaudhry, who quickly returned to his investigation of the disappeared. This time, he warned, he would order the heads of the security agencies themselves to testify. He also summoned Imran Munir once again, but before Munir could appear, Musharraf declared a state of emergency and put Chaudhry under house arrest. Lawyers around Pakistan, horrified to see the chief justice so flagrantly humiliated, rose up to demand his reinstatement. The Lawyers\u2019 Movement, as it came to be known, was soon embraced by hundreds of thousands of Pakistani citizens, who marched in massive protests, and Musharraf, in the end, was the one who had to resign.<\/p>\n

The current president, Asif Ali Zardari, gained considerable momentum in his election campaign by pledging to reinstate Chaudhry. But once in office, he hesitated to follow through on that pledge, likely because he was concerned that the court would reopen a series of corruption cases against him. The marches grew larger, though, and on March 16, 2009, while I happened to be in Pakistan, Zardari finally reinstated Chaudhry, along with several other similarly deposed justices.<\/p>\n

I joined the hundreds of supporters gathered at the chief justice\u2019s house in Islamabad. Families came with children, people waved placards that bore Chaudhry\u2019s image, and a marching band with bagpipes played. Chaudhry had always maintained that his struggle was legal, not political, but the scene had all the markings of a post-campaign victory celebration. I made my way along the receiving line until I reached Chaudhry, who was surrounded by the leaders of the Lawyers\u2019 Movement. He had been shaking hands for several hours, but I thought I would try to ask a question. When I reached him, I took his hand and asked him when he planned to take up the missing-person cases with which his name had become synonymous. He paused, as if parsing the political consequences of his answer. \u201cI don\u2019t know,\u201d he finally said, and giggled uncomfortably as his handlers, looking equally uncomfortable, hustled me down the line.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

It is the shooting, oddly enough, that has generated the most detailed evidence about Siddiqui\u2019s present circumstances. After the confrontation in Ghazni, she was choppered by air ambulance to the Craig Joint Theater Hospital at Bagram air base\u2014the same base, of course, where she may or may not once have been a prisoner. Her medical intake record notes that she was a three on the fifteen-point Glasgow Coma Scale, meaning she was almost dead. The surgeons opened her up from breastbone to bellybutton, searching for bullets. They cut out twenty centimeters of her small intestine. They also gave her transfusions of red blood cells and fresh frozen platelets and dosed her with clotting medication, which suggests she had experienced heavy blood loss. \u201cFBI agents in room with patient at all times,\u201d the medical record stated. \u201cPatient is in four-point restraints.\u201d In the span of just two weeks she went from near clinical death to being deemed \u201cmedically stable and capable of confinement.\u201d The doctor witnessed every detail of her recovery. \u201cDetails of pertinent medical findings: Very thin, sallow coloring, dry cracked lips,\u201d and also \u201cflat affect, crying at times.\u201d<\/p>\n

From that point forward, however, the clarity of medical detail is clouded by legal concerns. Siddiqui had no lawyer during her two weeks at Bagram or on her flight to the United States. The day after she landed, she was in a Manhattan courtroom, facing charges of attempted murder. In allowing her to be transported to the United States without even a consular visit, her own government, notwithstanding its public pronouncements of support and calls for repatriation, effectively gave her up without a fight. The Pakistani embassy eventually hired a team of three attorneys to augment her two existing public defenders, but Siddiqui refused to work with them. During a prison phone call in June, she told her brother, \u201cI just protest against this whole process and don\u2019t want to participate.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only people Siddiqui seemed to trust, strangely, were the FBI agents who sat by her bedside at Bagram, and whose presence she repeatedly requested in the apparent belief that if only she could speak to them for a moment she could clear everything up. According to notes taken by the agents, she was voluble during those early days of her detention in Afghanistan. She said she \u201cmade some bad decisions in the past, but mostly did so out of naivety.\u201d In contrast to her later statements, she confirmed that she was married to Ammar al Baluchi, whom she met when his sister rented a room at her mother\u2019s house, and that Baluchi had asked her to help his friend Majid Khan with his immigration problem. She admitted having possession of chemicals including sodium cyanide at the time of her capture, though \u201cnot for nefarious purposes,\u201d and she said that she had been \u201cin \u2018hiding\u2019 for the last five years\u201d and \u201caware that various law enforcement agencies had been looking for her.\u201d She had little to say about her children. \u201cShe finds it easier to presume them dead,\u201d the agents noted. She also volunteered to become a U.S. intelligence \u201casset\u201d in the hope that she could find the \u201ctruth to the inner depths.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is uncertain what the defense\u2019s theory of the case will be when Siddiqui goes on trial this November. Perhaps, as one of her lawyers told me, she never even touched the gun. Perhaps she acted in self-defense. Or perhaps, as another of her lawyers claimed at an early hearing, \u201cshe\u2019s crazy.\u201d In this last matter, ambiguity is once again the rule. Four prison psychiatrists examined Siddiqui. Two of them determined she was malingering, the faked illness being insanity. A third said she was delusional and that her behavior was \u201cdiametrically opposed to everything we know about the clinical presentation of malingerers,\u201d and the fourth psychiatrist initially diagnosed her as depressive\u2014and possibly psychotic\u2014but later switched to the malingering camp. Siddiqui\u2019s own contribution to the debate came in the form of a rambling letter, written last July to \u201cAll Americans loyal to the U.S.A.,\u201d in which she proclaimed her innocence, decried the propaganda being spun against her by the \u201cZionist-controlled U.S. media,\u201d and alleged that she spent years in a prison \u201ccontrolled by the \u2018Americans,\u2019 of the kind that control the U.S. media.\u201d Later that month the court ruled that she \u201cmay have some mental health issues\u201d but that she was fit enough to stand trial.<\/p>\n

Aafia Siddiqui is not presently charged with any act of terrorism, nor is she accused of conspiring with terrorists or giving comfort to terrorists. Her trial is unlikely to yield satisfactory answers about where she was, who picked her up and why, or even who she really is. Maybe she was working for the United States, or Pakistan, or maybe she was just in the United States looking for a job and committed a minor bit of immigration fraud that catalyzed a violent farce. One FBI official told U.S. News & World Report in 2003, \u201cThere\u2019s a distinct possibility she was just a victim.\u201d Perhaps Aafia Siddiqui is guilty of nothing more than poor choice in men. We simply do not know, and the system in which she has found herself ensures that neither will her captors.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

The person who seemed best able to explain what really happened to Siddiqui, her sister, Fowzia, remained elusive until my last day in Pakistan. At our first meeting she had promised to pull together all sorts of evidence of her sister\u2019s innocence, but by the time she finally agreed to meet again, my bags were packed and my plane just hours from departure.<\/p>\n

She said she avoided me all these weeks because she\u2019d been told by \u201cmultiple people\u201d that I worked for the CIA. \u201cAll you want are documents,\u201d she said. \u201cI just want someone who can listen.\u201d Then she dragged out a family photo album and started showing me pictures of her sister with various animals: goats, a camel, the family cat. \u201cAafia loved animals,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Then she opened a more formal binder. She flipped to a grainy photocopy of a woman lying on a bed. The woman bore a striking resemblance to Siddiqui, only she looked younger and softer, as if she\u2019d been airbrushed; sitting at her bedside was a young man\u2014Fowzia wouldn\u2019t say who\u2014and mounted on a wall behind her was what appeared to be the seal of the United States government. The seal, Fowzia said, proved the picture was taken in Bagram, but she wouldn\u2019t say why it proved this, and before I could inspect the image any further she flipped the page and wouldn\u2019t let me look at it again. \u201cI\u2019d love it if a real investigator would come and devote himself to the case,\u201d she said. \u201cYou know, really work on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0Petra Bartosiewicz<\/strong> is writing a book on terrorism trials in the U.S., “The Best Terrorists We Could Find,” to be published by Nation Books early next year. You can find her daily coverage of the Aafia Siddiqui trial beginning Jan. 19 at the Cageprisoners website (www.cageprisoners.com<\/a>). She can be reached at petrabart@petrabart.com<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Aafia<\/p>\n

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