Aafia Siddiqui Sentenced: A Grievous Miscarriage of Justice

"Pakistan erupts after US jailing of 'daughter of the nation' Aafia Siddiqui"

by Declan Walsh in Karachi, Guardian, UK, Sept. 24th, 2010

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m70094

Thousands take to the streets to protest as scientist convicted of attempting to kill US soldiers gets 86 years

Pakistan's prime minister hailed a scientist convicted of attempting to kill American soldiers as the "daughter of the nation" today, and vowed to redouble efforts to secure her return to Pakistan.

Thousands of protesters took to the streets after a New York court sentenced Aafia Siddiqui, a US-educated neuroscientist and mother of three, to 86 years in jail.

Police fired teargas and scuffled with protesters surging towards the heavily fortified US consulate in her hometown, Karachi.

(snip)

But Siddiqui's case has attracted deep support from across the political spectrum.

Her plight taps into deep anti-American hostility in a country where a recent survey found that just 17% of Pakistanis view Washington favourably.

(snip)

In an effort to quell criticism of the government's failure to secure Siddiqui's repatriation from the US, prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told parliament today he had appealed to the US to release Siddiqui in order to "improve its image" in Pakistan.

"We all are united, and we want the daughter of the nation to come back to Pakistan," he said. The government spent $2m hiring defence lawyers for Siddiqui; today Gilani said he was willing to negotiate an extradition treaty with the US to facilitate her early return.

In the trial Siddiqui, a diminutive 38-year-old, was accused of snatching a gun from an American soldier in an Afghan jail cell in July 2008 and opening fire.

Although she hit nobody, she herself was shot in the stomach by an American officer and, a month later, flown to America to face trial.

Many Pakistanis believed she could not receive a fair hearing – she was tried near the site of the World Trade Centre attacks – but she weakened her defence with frequent intemperate outbursts against the US government and speeches against Jewish conspiracies that caused her to be ejected from court several times.

Her case was also weakened by the Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, who issued a statement of support.

She was found guilty in February. But the trial, which concentrated on the events in Afghanistan, did little to illuminate the wider mysteries of Siddiqui's story.

In March 2003 she disappeared from Karachi with her three children, one of whom was six months old, and only resurfaced in July 2008 when she was arrested in Ghazni.

US prosecutors said she was carrying details of prominent American monuments, bomb-making notes and a small amount of cyanide.

Siddiqui's supporters insist she spent the missing five years at the US detention centre in Bagram, north of Kabul, and her youngest child may have died. US officials deny she was in their custody.

In 2003 US officials accused her of belonging to al-Qaida and being married to Ammar al Baluchi, a nephew of the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. Siddiqui's relatives deny this is true.

The case is likely to remain on the agenda between Pakistan and the US. Yvonne Ridley, a journalist and campaigner for Siddiqui, said supporters would step up pressure through a campaign of civil disobedience.

"It will involve blocking Nato supply lines into Afghanistan," she said. "This is not going to go away."

It's "nice" that the Pakistani PM has called her the "daughter of the nation", but has the PM'ship there spoken out against the U.S. holding her, before, or only speaking out now that the Pakistani population is very angry and loud about the U.S. convicting her? If the PM hasn't spoken before to demand her return to Pakistan, then he's just covering his ass, politically, and Pakistanis should see through this masquerade.

Update: Actually, the first of Stephen Lendman's prior articles that he provides a link for in the above piece is of Dec. 15th, 2008 and says the following happened on August 12th, 2008 and, I suppose anyway, it reflects what the then Pakistani PM, if the present one wasn't PM at the time, wanted.

Quote: "-- August 12: the Washington Pakistani embassy formally requests that Aafia be repatriated to Pakistan".

Re. Declan Walsh about the Taliban spokesman:

Quote: Her case was also weakened by the Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, who issued a statement of support".

That is surely nonsense. The U.S. would not have treated her any better if Hakimullah Mehsud had stayed silent. Read Stephen Lendman's article about how she has been treated since 2003 and it'll become strongly clear that the Taliban leader's words of support for her definitely would not cause the U.S. to be any hellbent worse than it was before. And I just read his Dec. 15th, 2008 article, the first of the three linked in his above article. It's absolutely clear that the Taliban leader stating his support for her definitely couldn't "weaken" Aafia Siddiqui's case at all!

Some journalists are definitely and clearly not analysts. And this one writing for the Guardian UK seems to be an idiot.

Questioning her treatment by the U.S.:

Perhaps the U.S. war-making and profiteering elites are doing this to her in order to try to drive more anger in Islam against the U.S. with the "hope" that some of these Muslims will commit acts the U.S. elites will then claim justify continuation of war on Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, or greater expansion or escalation of the war.

I don't see how else these hellbent elites could gain from treating this innocent woman the way they have always been doing with or to her. Or maybe they're doing it just for the psychopathic, sadistic pleasure that they derive from their hellbent ways against other people. But, the war leadership definitely does strategize a lot even if it is in hellishly poor, stupid, and treasonous ways.

Otoh, now that I've read through nearly half of Stephen Lendman's Dec. 15th, 2008 article (the first linked in his above one), it seems the U.S. war elites may have been doing this to her all along because of perceiving her as a real threat to them in the U.S., politically; because if her activism and Islamic teaching in the U.S. had become widely known and greatly appreciated, as should've happened, then many more Americans might've joined the anti-war, pro-peace movement, more numerously and more strongly. Or it's what the war elites may have had for strategic reason of doing to her what they have done and continue to do.

It's clear that the U.S. troops and/or officers who raped her or wittingly allowed her to be raped and brutally treated surely derived sadistic pleasure from this, and the war elites probably also did, since they definitely wanted to silence her once and for all without necessarily killing her; but this was not done without a strategic reason for it and the above one seems highly most probable when reading about her GREAT work or activism in the U.S.