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The trial of Aafia Siddiqui, who is charged with attempted murder of a U.S. Agent, begins on January 19th at the S.D.N.Y. courthouse at 500 Pearl St. Manhattan, New York, on the 6th floor, Judge Berman presiding.
This week has seen first a motion from the defense to forbid mention of, and presentation of, information on terrorism and alleged al Qaeda connections, on grounds that she is not charged with anything related to terrorism, and to forbid use of printed documents from Afghanistan related to the arrest, since the court will not be hearing from Afghan witnesses from Ghazni. The judge ruled that only handwritten documents allegedly found on Ms. Siddiqui will be admissible and that terrorism may not be brought up by the prosecution. He also ruled something about use of forensic evidence on fingerprints (there is a dispute over fingerprint evidence from the alleged gun) but I was not able to determine what it was he ruled, with some news outlets actually saying the exact opposite of each other.
For those who haven’t been following, or don’t know what the trial is about, Aafia Siddiqui is a PhD neuroscientist (2001, Brandeis, something related to the psychophysics of teaching methods using imitation), who disappeared in March of 2003, and reappeared in Ghazni, Afghanistan by the side of the road near the Governor’s mansion, with her son, wearing a bourka and supposedly carrying any number of scary things in a handbag.
The prosecution is alleging that Ms. Siddiqui grabbed an American warrant officer’s M4 rifle and tried to kill some FBI agents and interpreters, the defense is arguing that she never grabbed the gun and never shot it, either. Both agree that whatever happened resulted in the warrant officer firing at her two shots with a pistol and hitting her twice in the torso, after which she was shipped to Bagram Craig Field Hospital for surgery, blood, and two weeks of interrogation while strapped to a four point restraint bed "recovering" with the lights on and three cameras in the room. And then she was rendered to Brooklyn.
She had multiple competency hearings and psychiatric tests, due to the fact that she is thought by some to be delusional due to what happened during the time she was disappeared. Many human rights organizations, at least one court in Pakistan, and her family believe she was tortured at a black site for several years. Two of her children are missing, one is presumed dead. Her third child is with her sister in Pakistan, the Pakistani government was forced in court by lawyers for her family to pay for her defense team.
There’s a lot more than that, but suffice it to say this is a trial with large international ramifications, which hinges critically on torture allegations (which may or may not be true but many believe are), in which the defendant does not believe justice is possible, and, given the proceedings to date, may be dead on on that one. Which explains why there has not been much coverage, no civil liberties groups in the U.S. are involved, and nobody appears to be headed down there in droves to live blog or anything. Probably, the fact that nobody can be guaranteed that taking a stand on one side or the other of this trial will help their political cause has as much to do with it as the fact that she and her family are insanely paranoid about everyone around them.
But then, your civil liberties and human rights are determined by how you treat the worst cases. I guess how you treat the most confusing ones is optional.
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““A lawyer for Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist accused of shooting at FBI agents in Afghanistan, told a pre-trial hearing on Monday that the defence team rejected the charge since there were no fingerprints or other forensic evidence that she even picked up the gun. “We’re not saying she did it in self-defence. We’re not saying it was an accident. We’re saying she simply did not do it,” Defence attorney Linda Moreno told U.S. District Judge Richard Berman ahead of Ms. Siddiqui’s trial on January 19.”
http://freedetainees.org/8215
Thanks for the update, ondelette. This case just gets stranger as it goes on. It seems to me that the ruling to prevent the prosecution mentioning anything about terror is unusual for a US court where terrorism might come into play. Have you seen anything like that before?
Indeed, thanks for the update. Seems like we’ve got a lot of high profile trials coming down the pipe…
I don’t know, but I haven’t. I’m also unclear on how the issue of testimony from Ghazni is being resolved, something’s happened but it isn’t clear what. There are Afghan witnesses who say she was fired on, unarmed.
I think the judge is finally feeling a little pressure. The attorneys are good, even if Aafia Siddiqui herself wants to fire them. And the government of Pakistan is being pushed to do something, so there’s at least some notion that if the case isn’t squeaky clean the whole world will see it.
Unfortunately, it’s been a year and a half of unsqueaky uncleanliness, and the elephant in the room, torture, is still an unmentionable, and the prosecuting attorney is still an unreplaced Bush guy. The competency hearings and their associated evaluations were an abomination.
For a large segment of Pakistan, this trial embodies all of the disappeared, the way the previous one did in the Pakistani Supreme Court, until Pervez Musharraf sacked the court and suspended the constitution rather than produce the 58 disappeared he’d been ordered to produce in court (a slightly different interpretation of ‘produce the body’). That Judge Berman finally sees what people have been asking him to see for over a year now is hopefully a good thing. Aafia Siddiqui believes that since she has no hope of justice, it is against Islam to spend millions of dollars on lawyers when Pakistanis are starving. She has a point, even if it probably is worth spending the money to start climbing out of a deep hole of injustice for both countries.
Thanks, bluebutterfly. Linda Moreno did that on Monday, it was apparently at least partly successful. But it isn’t clear what information about fingerprints is being allowed and what is not, at this point. Something got barred, but different reports have contradictory information about what. The defense wants it admitted that her fingerprints were not on the weapon. The prosecution wants to present expert testimony that M4′s don’t retain fingerprints like other surfaces (?!?).
This one isn’t high profile for no known reason, but it should be.
well, thanks for raising its profile with a diary, ondelette
Thanks so much for keeping tabs on this Ondelette. I think it’s so important to stress that Afghan witnesses (at the police station) immediately gave very different accounts than the US soldiers did. And the details of how she and her son were found wandering about are just bizarre. This whole case stinks to high heaven. And I hate that her ‘lost’ children seem utterly forgotten.
please keep us posted about this case, one of the stranger trees in the haunted forest.
Actually, if anybody knows how to use the PACER system really well, like how to get a single transcript out of it, I’d be much obliged. I’m signed up but scared to use it for fear of getting lots of extraneous transcripts but there must be some trick to get only one. I accidentally ended up paying an arm and a leg to the court transcript service for the competency hearings, money I didn’t really have, and I’d like to be able to read and maybe post on the trial hearings if I could get the data (attending is out of the question, I’m thousands of miles away).
Don’t forget that Siddiqui is married into the family of KSM, her second husband being a nephew of KSM. On the other hand, Aafia was someone KSM had given up under torture as a sleeper agent. Note that Aafia and her first husband had been questioned and let go by the U.S. after it was noted that she and her first husband had gotten money wired to them from the Saudi embassy and then brought some military-related equipment and shipped it to Pakistan.
There’s something very, very fishy in all the to-dos around this case. There should be an army of reporters interested in this. But like the “suicide”/murder of Al-Libi in Libya, where there should be massive interest by investigative reporters in key cases, there is, as ondelette notes, relative disinterest.
Let’s see how this trial proceeds. I’ll certainly try and give it some attention, and I’m very glad to see ondelette on the case. Perhaps some with more clout, money and time will also be following the trial.
If there is something fishy that involves U.S. or Saudi or Pakistani intelligence, then you can understand the alacrity with which the judge was amenable to foregoing addressing earlier “terrorist” charges.
I look forward to more, ondelette, and thanks.
History Commons has a nice, documented timeline on the case.
I will try. BTW, the marriage to Ammar al Baluchi (KSM’s nephew) is still a matter of some dispute. The original allegation for which they put up notices saying she was wanted, in Pakistan, was a connection to Majid Khan and Uzair Paracha — the plot to cripple the nation’s infrastructure on which Mr. Khan was supposedly an expert since he ran the cash register in his father’s Baltimore gas station. It has morphed numerous times, as have many of the other things about this. Majid Khan was ruled unfit to stand trial by the military commission, but by that time the allegations against him had changed to transporting cash from al Qaeda to Indonesia or something.
What is unclear is whether two weeks of interrogation “notes” from Craig Field Hospital are going to be admissible, perhaps the terrorism ban keeps those out. It isn’t clear that they don’t represent information taken under duress (she didn’t know where her son was, she was strapped to the bed with lights 24/7, she was recovering from life threatening injuries, one of the interrogators was present when she was shot, etc., etc.). She wasn’t Mirandized until she got to New York. And she never got consular access during that time, or a hearing in front of an Afghan judicial authority.
I have no idea what the strategy of the defense is beyond that she never picked up the gun and never shot anybody. That’s what she and the Ghazni police both say happened. But some of the concessions to the defense were made on the basis of no testimony from the Afghans, too, so it isn’t clear who won. It also isn’t clear whether or not she’s still being searched under B.O.P. protocol, the judge had ordered it stopped “if possible” whatever that means.
Sad story and sad justice.
Please keep posting about this case. It is a sign of how little we know that the case is not covered by the media. Thank you.
I may be wrong, but isn’t there also a serious question about what happened to her children?
I understand that one child, the oldest (the “son”), was apparently found with her, but some have claimed he’s not actually her child. What happened to her other two children remains murky.