The
Terror-Industrial Complex: US Shadowy Mercenaries,
Kidnappers, Killers, Torturers
13 February 2010By Chris Hedges
The conviction of the Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia
Siddiqui in New York last week of trying to kill
American military officers and FBI agents illustrates
that the greatest danger to our security comes not
from al-Qaida but the thousands of shadowy
mercenaries, kidnappers, killers and torturers our
government employs around the globe.
The bizarre story surrounding Siddiqui, 37, who
received an undergraduate degree from MIT and a
doctorate in neuroscience from Brandeis University,
often defies belief. Siddiqui, who could spend 50
years in prison on seven charges when she is sentenced
in May, was by her own account abducted in 2003 from
her hometown of Karachi, Pakistan, with her three
children—two of whom remain missing—and spirited to a
secret U.S. prison where she was allegedly tortured
and mistreated for five years. The American government
has no comment, either about the alleged clandestine
detention or the missing children.
Siddiqui was discovered in 2008 disoriented and
apparently aggressive and hostile, in Ghazni,
Afghanistan, with her oldest son. She allegedly was
carrying plans to make explosives, lists of New York
landmarks and notes referring to “mass-casualty
attacks.” But despite these claims the government
prosecutors chose not to charge her with terrorism or
links to al-Qaida—the reason for her original
appearance on the FBI’s most-wanted list six years
ago. Her supporters suggest that the papers she
allegedly had in her possession when she was found in
Afghanistan, rather than detail coherent plans for
terrorist attacks, expose her severe mental
deterioration, perhaps the result of years of
imprisonment and abuse. This argument was bolstered by
some of the pages of the documents shown briefly to
the court, including a crude sketch of a gun that was
described as a “match gun” that operates by lighting a
match.
“Justice was not served,” Tina Foster, executive
director of the International Justice Network and the
spokesperson for Aafia Siddiqui’s family, told me.
“The U.S. government made a decision to label this
woman a terrorist, but instead of putting her on trial
for the alleged terrorist activity she was put on
trial for something else. They tried to convict her of
that something else, not with evidence, but because
she was a terrorist. She was selectively prosecuted
for something that would allow them to only tell their
side of the story.”
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The government built its entire case instead around
disputed events in the 300-square-foot room of the
Ghazni police station. It insisted that on July 18,
2008, the diminutive Siddiqui, who had been arrested
by local Afghan police the day before, seized an M4
assault rifle that was left unattended and fired at
American military and FBI agents. None of the
Americans were injured. Siddiqui, however, was gravely
wounded, shot twice in the stomach.
No one, other than Siddiqui, has attempted to explain
where she was for five years after she vanished in
2003. No one seems to be able to explain why a
disoriented Pakistani woman and her son, an American
citizen, neither of whom spoke Dari, were discovered
by local residents wandering in a public square in
Ghazni, where an eyewitness told Harpers Magazine the
distraught Siddiqui “was attacking everyone who got
close to her.” Had Siddiqui, after years of
imprisonment and torture, perhaps been at the U.S.
detention center in Bagram and then dumped with one of
her three children in Ghazi? And where are the other
two children, one of whom also is an American citizen?
In an article written by Petra Bartosiewicz in the
November 2009 Harper’s Magazine, authorities in
Afghanistan described a series of events at odds with
the official version.
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’s police headquarters. The team was shown to a
meeting room that was partitioned by a yellow curtain.
“None of the United States personnel were aware,” the
complaint states, “that Siddiqui was being held,
unsecured, behind the curtain.” 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, “the Warrant Officer placed his United
States Army M-4 rifle on the floor to his right next
to the curtain, near his right foot.” 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
“slightly back” and pointed the gun directly at the
head of the captain. One of the interpreters saw her.
He lunged for the gun. Siddiqui shouted, “Get the fuck
out of here!” and fired twice. She hit no one. As the
interpreter wrestled her to the ground, the warrant
officer drew his sidearm and fired “approximately two
rounds” into Siddiqui’s abdomen. She collapsed, still
struggling, then fell unconscious.
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 “demanded to take over custody” 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 “senior
Ghazni police officer” 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, “thinking that she had
explosives and would attack them as a suicide bomber,
shot her and took her.”
Siddiqui’s 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’s 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, “She is loose,” and
then someone shot her. When she regained consciousness
she heard someone else say, “We could lose our jobs.”
Siddiqui’s defense team pointed out that there was an
absence of bullets, casings or residue from the M4,
all of which suggested it had not been fired. They
played a video to show that two holes in a wall
supposedly caused by the M4 had been there before July
18. They also highlighted inconsistencies in the
testimony from the nine government witnesses, who at
times gave conflicting accounts of how many people
were in the room, where they were sitting or standing
and how many shots were fired.
Siddiqui, who took the stand during the trial against
the advice of her defense team, called the report that
she had fired the unattended M4 assault rifle at the
Americans “the biggest lie.” She said she had been
trying to flee the police station because she feared
being tortured. Siddiqui, whose mental stability often
appeared to be in question during the trial, was
ejected several times from the Manhattan courtroom for
erratic behavior and outbursts.
“It is difficult to get a fair trial in this country
if the government wants to accuse you of terrorism,”
said Foster. “It is difficult to get a fair trial on
any types of charges. The government is allowed to
tell the jury you are a terrorist before you have to
put on any evidence. The fear factor that has emerged
since 9/11 has permeated into the U.S. court system in
a profoundly disturbing way. It embraces the idea that
we can compromise core principles, for example the
presumption of innocence, based on perceived threats
that may or may not come to light. We, as a society,
have chosen to cave on fear.”
I spent more than a year covering al-Qaida for The New
York Times in Europe and the Middle East. The threat
posed by Islamic extremists, while real, is also
wildly overblown, used to foster a climate of fear and
political passivity, as well as pump billions of
dollars into the hands of the military, private
contractors, intelligence agencies and repressive
client governments including that of Pakistan. The
leader of one FBI counterterrorism squad told The New
York Times that of the 5,500 terrorism-related leads
its 21 agents had pursued over the past five years,
just 5 percent were credible and not one had foiled an
actual terrorist plot. These statistics strike me as
emblematic of the entire war on terror.
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Terrorism, however, is a very good business. The
number of extremists who are planning to carry out
terrorist attacks is minuscule, but there are vast
departments and legions of ambitious intelligence and
military officers who desperately need to strike a
tangible blow against terrorism, real or imagined, to
promote their careers as well as justify obscene
expenditures and a flagrant abuse of power. All this
will not make us safer. It will not protect us from
terrorist strikes. The more we dispatch brutal forms
of power to the Islamic world the more enraged Muslims
and terrorists we propel into the ranks of those who
oppose us. The same perverted logic saw the Argentine
military, when I lived in Buenos Aires, “disappear”
30,000 of the nation’s citizens, the vast majority of
whom were innocent. Such logic also fed the drive to
root out terrorists in El Salvador, where, when I
arrived in 1983, the death squads were killing between
800 and 1,000 people a month. Once you build secret
archipelagos of prisons, once you commit huge sums of
money and invest your political capital in a ruthless
war against subversion, once you empower a network of
clandestine killers, operatives and torturers, you
fuel the very insecurity and violence you seek to
contain.
I do not know whether Siddiqui is innocent or guilty.
But I do know that permitting jailers, spies,
kidnappers and assassins to operate outside of the
rule of law contaminates us with our own bile.
Siddiqui is one victim. There are thousands more we do
not see. These abuses, justified by the war on terror,
have created a system of internal and external state
terrorism that is far more dangerous to our security
and democracy than the threat posed by Islamic
radicals.
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