Clive Stafford Smith, Dr Aafia’s lawyer, mentions, ” when I met Aafia and I started learning about her case, really, it’s the one that shocks me more than anything else when she was first abducted and sold for a bounty to the Americans by the Pakistanis. It wasn’t just her; she had her three children along and the very first thing that happened was apparently they dropped one child on his head the baby month and apparently killed him, although no one’s ever
admitted that, and they took the other two kids, ages three and six, took them a thousand kilometers up to Afghanistan, uh, and did pretty unspeakable things to them too.”
President Bush issued a secret memo that empowered the CIA to move against groups that might be planning terrorist activities; in other words, he empowered the CIA to kidnap, kill, and operate without having to worry about legal proceedings. Guantánamo prison got full of the people who had actually ever been on the battlefield of Afghanistan or even in Afghanistan, but they were turned in for all this money along with a story about how they were Al-Qaeda and thereby began the Vicious Cycle. Turning in on the allegation of working for Al-Qaeda and then getting tortured to accept that was the bitter truth of many prisoners, and unfortunately seems like the case with Aafia Siddique.
Americans paid good money for these innocents on their connections with Al-Qaeda, and they were not ready to hear otherwise. It was $55,000 reportedly paid to people allied with then Pakistan president Musharraf to abduct her and turn her over to the Americans, according to Dr. Aafia’s lawyer. One of her kids, now 26 and a qualified doctor,
recounts how he was taken to a really dirty place and held there for a little bit, then he was taken by the US a thousand kilometers from where he was in Karachi to Kabul and put in prison for the next 5 years. Her daughter Mariam, who was three, was taken to a separate dark room from her brother Ahmed, and then she was taken up to Kabul, where she was forcibly adopted into a family of American white Christian people, Josh and Natalie, who had to have been intelligence agents there in Afghanistan, and she’s held by them in adoption, but she’s called Fatima, and she’s held there for seven years. They were taken from Pakistan to Afghanistan. The CIA imprisoned Ahmed, who’s five or six years old, and put him in a juvenile prison; he’s told his name is Ali and to never speak of this again, and Mariam becomes Fatima, who is adopted by a white American couple living in Kabul.
Americans deny to this day that Aafia was in a secret prison in Afghanistan. A bunch of prisoners who were in Bagram with her, when they got out, saw pictures of her, and a whole series of independent people recognized Aafia as the woman they had seen there, and there’s no question she was abducted with the children. She told her lawyer what happened to her, and she was later taken to a women’s prison, a women’s place in some dark side where she was in a room with two Afghan women, and she was raped by the gods; they were Afghan gods. She was put in an isolation cell and the abuse got worse while she was in those prisons The US had a one-way gloss, and they were seemingly abusing children on the other side of the glass that she was meant to think were her children.
The tales of torture have been all part of the news for two decades, always neglected by Pakistani and American authorities, but the recent claims of her lawyer have sparked a heated debate on her abduction that too at a crucial time in Pakistan when negative feelings against the state’s security agencies are gaining momentum. Her lawyers statements do justify the silence of higher authorities of both countries on Dr. Aafia’s case, and his claims are shameful for every Pakistani about how a country sells its daughter for bounty and, if true, the heaviest and most bitter truth to live with as a Pakistani.
