Speech Given by Karina on the Boston Common
Most of the world has stopped thinking about the long-incarcerated detainees of the War on Terror that was declared by George W. Bush after 9/11/2001. In truth, Federal government and Israel-connected Homeland Security agents had already started investigating and raiding Islamic organizations and charities around the US earlier that year. Of all the Muslim political prisoners of the US, one person in particular stands out: the graceful, articulate and brilliant young Dr. Aafia Siddique.
All the other Muslim War On Terror prisoners who were extrajudicially rendered in Afghanistan or Pakistan and sold for bounty to the US have been male (to my knowledge). Everyone at Guantanamo is male. All of the Afghan militants held in Bagram prison are male. Only Aafia Siddique is female. Long before anyone knew her name, she was known as the “Grey Lady of Bagram.” She and her children were held and abused for years, separately, inside the walls of the US military prison in Afghanistan.
After the US invaded Afghanistan they dropped leaflets down from airplanes offering between $2000-6000 per head for any suspected terrorists. As a result, a market was created for kidnappers. Thousands of random men were detained and handed over to the US for interrogation. Aafia Siddique was disappeared in Pakistan in the spring of 2003.
In the recently published book, “Don’t Forget Us Here: Lost and Found in Guantanamo,” Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni tourist thus detained without charge, explained that while there were a handful of prisoners there that actually knew Osama bin Laden or belonged to some kind of Islamic fighting group, the vast majority were completely innocent, non-violent people being held for years and years and brutally humiliated and tortured in an attempt to force them to confess to being people they were not, and that they had committed crimes they knew nothing about.
It has always been a mystery as to why Aafia and her children were abducted while on their way to visit relatives. Was she the victim of a vindictive ex-husband’s slander? Did someone utter her name while being waterboarded? Was it her charity efforts as part of the Muslim Students Association to collect boots and winter clothing to send to displaced families fleeing war?
Aged 34, speaking fluent English, having earned a PhD in Child Development at MIT and Brandeis before returning to her native country of Pakistan, Aafia with her gentle eyes and happy demeanor does not fit the profile of an Islamic terrorist. It seems unlikely that this arrest, made most likely by ISI, Pakistani security services, was a random error in judgment.
An important clue emerged as a result of the Peace and Justice Foundation’s recent series of Freedom Rallies in various cities to support and raise awareness of US political prisoner Dr. Aafia Siddique. While most of America has forgotten her, or has no idea who she is, a very enthusiastic detractor crawled out of the woodwork: Sam Westrop, director of the Zionist extremist hate group that stalks Muslim leaders, “Islamist Watch.” He published a very dangerous hit piece on Aafia’s supporters in both the Middle East Forum and National Review, https://www.meforum.org/62644/american-islamists-advocate-for-lady-al-qaeda - publications with long and close connections to Bush-era neocons and anti-Muslim smear campaigners Daniel Pipes and Steve Emerson, who facilitated the imprisonment and deportation of Muslim and Arab academics for their political views by feeding false intelligence to the US government via their “think tank” the Investigative Project and other extreme right-wing racist organizations whose main objective is trying to prevent Palestinians and American Muslims attain political equality. After these groups failed to prevent local Muslims from building the golden-domed Roxbury Mosque, https://rense.com/general76/who.htm I had totally forgot about them.
But here Sam Westrop was, taking pictures of protesters without asking their permission and trying to get an interview with Mauri Saalakhan, the primary organizer of the event. Sam’s intense enthusiasm for the cause of undermining the case to free Aafia Siddique after 18 years really made it crystal clear that taking her down was one of his organization’s pet projects.
But why did the pro-Israel lobbyists target this cute little grad student? Westrop leaves us a very important clue by linking to a press conference, covered by CNN, two years after she was abducted. http://edition.cnn.com/2004/US/05/26/terror.threat.transcript/ US Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller on May 27, 2004 displayed Aafia’s face alongside 6 men declared as America’s Most Wanted. Americans were to be “on the lookout” for them. Mueller claimed, “Aafia Siddique is an al Qaeda operative and facilitator, she attended colleges in the Boston area, and is believed to have left Boston in January of 2003.” Literally that’s all they could come up with. Bent over in agony from bullet wounds to her stomach, Aafia was sentenced to 86 years in US Federal prison by Judge Richard Berman for “attempted murder” of heavily armed US soldiers in an Afghan police station in 2008 as she allegedly tried to escape from custody. Her supposed “crime” was committed in Afghanistan by a Pakistani citizen. So by what stretch of the imagination should she go to trial in the United States? Keep in mind that al Qaida is not even known for recruiting female militants. The neocons have always been known to use the labels “al Qaeda” and “Islamofascist” extremely loosely.
It sure looks like these right wing Zionist criminals were intimately involved in providing false intelligence to the US government in order to help the US create an illusion of “doing something” against the “Islamic threat” while simultaneously getting rid of a popular Muslim community organizer and public speaker. Boston neocon fingerprints are all over this case. Their time-worn approach, which they also used against the Roxbury mosque, was to feed fake terrorist allegations to the media, while simultaneously creating court cases over lesser crimes like money laundering or even civil infractions such as parking zoning laws. Similarly, at Aafia’s trial there was zero mention of her belonging to any terrorist group even though news agencies had claimed that she had gone to LIberia to sell diamonds in order to raise funds for al Qaeda.
In 1996, Professor Noam Chomsky said fondly of Aafia, who was his student, “Aafia Siddique is an Institute in her self. She will bring change wherever she goes.”
Did the FBI target Aafia as the next Malcolm or the next H Rap Brown?
Aafia Siddique was an enthusiastic Muslim community organizer who was diligently engaged in outreach to explain Islam to her American fellow students, a philosopher who taught feminist theory based on theology, and who encouraged her fellow Muslim students to upgrade their religion. She was very much part of the movement to modernize Islamic political and moral thought to make it make sense for this century. She was a Hafiz of the Quran. She was also an idealist. Katherine Ozment describes in Boston Magazine how far-fetched seem the claims that this young mother and student had the time or the resources, let alone the desire to join al Qaida. https://www.bostonmagazine.com/2006/05/15/whos-afraid-of-aafia-siddiqui/
Retired Professor Chomsky issued a statement to be read at the Freedom Rally in Boston that took place on October 23, 2021:
“The US “war on terror” has left a shameful record of torture, vicious brutality, brutal crimes of state, still continuing. Aafiaa Siddiqui’s ordeal is one of the most disgraceful chapters of this trail of horror. She should be freed and compensated to the extent that it is at all possible. And we should all be asking ourselves whether we want this is what we want our country to be.”