Aafia Siddiqui: 'Victim of all victims' | Part I | Centre Stage
Aafia Siddiqui: 'Victim of all victims' | Part I | Centre Stage
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00:00When I met Afia, and I started learning about her case,
00:05really, it's the one that shocks me more than anything else.
00:09She's the only person we have a detailed history of
00:13who was put through the whole rendition-to-torture program
00:16by the Americans who was a woman.
00:23In the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001,
00:27the U.S. President at the time, George W. Bush,
00:30launched what he called the Global War on Terror.
00:33In the process, Bush authorized new policies and programs
00:37to hunt down and punish those who the Americans accused of being responsible.
00:42That included the CIA transferring suspects to black sites around the world
00:47and to the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
00:52Many people were held without charge, without evidence,
00:55and subjected to what became known as enhanced interrogation techniques.
01:00Taking center stage today is Clive Stafford Smith,
01:04a civil rights lawyer and counsel for multiple Guantanamo prisoners.
01:09His highest profile case, and most notorious, is that of Afia Siddiqui.
01:14Afia Siddiqui was once one of the FBI's most wanted suspects,
01:19today serving an 86-year prison sentence in Texas.
01:24Her story is intrinsically linked to the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks,
01:28but more than 20 years later, Afia's ordeal is far from over.
01:33Our guest, Clive Stafford Smith, shares the details of her case
01:37and explains why he believes her story is an example of some of the shadiest dealings
01:42and shocking methods that the Americans used to find and prosecute
01:46someone perceived as an enemy of the state.
01:49Clive Stafford Smith, thank you for joining us on Center Stage.
01:53It's great to be here.
01:54In January 2023, you took on the case of Afia Siddiqui,
01:59a 52-year-old woman serving an 86-year prison sentence
02:04in Fort Worth, Texas, for attempted murder.
02:08Tell me why you decided to represent her.
02:11Well, I was in Pakistan, actually,
02:13and I'd just got three of my Pakistanis out of Guantanamo.
02:18And Afia's older sister, Fawzia, who, if you're ever in trouble,
02:23you want to have Fawzia as your sister,
02:26she called me and said, would I go see Afia?
02:30And stupidly, I thought, oh, well, I just got rid of three of my clients,
02:34so now I must have time.
02:36So I went to see Afia in Texas as I was going there on a death penalty case.
02:41And, oh, boy, when you meet her, it's very hard to say no.
02:46You've had a great deal of experience with Guantanamo Bay.
02:50You have seen many prisoners, the traumatising effect it's had on them.
02:56What makes Afia's case different from those others you've represented?
03:03Well, you're right.
03:04I mean, I've had 87 people I've represented in Gitmo
03:07and various others elsewhere.
03:09And I will say, speaking as an American,
03:11if you transported me back to 2000,
03:15it would never occur to me that I would spend so much of my life
03:19talking to people about how America has tortured them.
03:24But when I met Afia and I started learning about her case,
03:29really, it's the one that shocks me more than anything else.
03:33When she was first abducted and sold for a bounty to the Americans
03:38by the Pakistanis, it wasn't just her.
03:41She had her three children along.
03:43And the very first thing that happened was apparently
03:47they dropped one child on his head.
03:49This was the baby six months old.
03:52And apparently killed him, although no one's ever admitted that.
03:55And they took the other two kids, aged three and six,
03:59took them 1,000 kilometres up to Afghanistan
04:03and did pretty unspeakable things to them, too.
04:07And I think you don't have to be a parent to realise
04:10that that's something that's about as shocking
04:14as anything you could do.
04:16So maybe we set the scene.
04:18On September 11, 2001, you have the deadliest attack on US soil
04:24that came to be known as 9-11.
04:26This event shakes the country to its core.
04:29It has such an effect on the American psyche.
04:32And that's important because it sort of explains
04:34this series of events that then unfolded, right?
04:38I mean, you probably remember, as I remember,
04:40where you were on 9-11.
04:42Everyone remembers, I think, where they were.
04:44I was in Louisiana and suddenly the whole place was a ghost town.
04:48And I have to say, since I was born and raised in Britain,
04:51I totally underestimated the impact of 9-11 on America.
04:55At the time or now?
04:56At the time.
04:58And so when all of this stuff started happening,
05:01and they were talking about invading Afghanistan
05:04and then Guantanamo and all these things,
05:06I thought, you know, this is mad, this is a terrible idea.
05:10And the first thing I was going to do was sue them over it
05:13and I could find no-one among my liberal defence lawyers
05:18doing death penalty work.
05:19Because that was the magnitude of what had happened.
05:22It had totally shaken America up.
05:24Well, five days later, on September 16, 2001,
05:28President George W. Bush declares a crusade,
05:31a war on terror against al-Qaeda and terrorist groups.
05:36Where is Afia Siddiqui at this point?
05:39Where is she living and what is she doing?
05:42Afia was doing, just finishing off her PhD.
05:46So she had done an undergrad degree at MIT
05:50and then a PhD at Brandeis.
05:53And, you know, this is actually the first place
05:55that everything goes wrong for her
05:57because everyone has always thought
05:59that she was some sort of neuroscientist, scientist person
06:03who could do all these things.
06:05She was really an educationalist.
06:07This is the basic facts of the case,
06:09that even her profession and her expertise,
06:12there is misinformation about this.
06:15They honestly thought that she was, because she went to MIT,
06:19some sort of physicist who could make a nuclear bomb.
06:23Whereas I've had really interesting chats with her
06:26about her PhD thesis,
06:28and it's about how to teach your children things.
06:30But the terrorism charges were never actually brought against her.
06:32She's never been charged with anything.
06:34At MIT, when she was studying,
06:37who were her friends, who were her colleagues?
06:40She was, you know, she was young, she was a student.
06:44She was already, you know, she's a sincere Muslim.
06:47She's not the extremist that some people make out.
06:51But, you know, she was passionate about certain causes.
06:54She was passionate, for example,
06:56about how there shouldn't be a genocide against Muslims in Bosnia.
07:01But I seem to recall so was President Clinton.
07:05And so she was involved in some of those causes,
07:07but she was most involved in trying to get her education degree
07:13so she could be an educationalist.
07:15Because there are allegations that she had ties to al-Qaeda
07:19and that she might have been involved in fundraising for the group.
07:24Yeah, yeah, that's total nonsense.
07:26I mean, if anyone has ties to al-Qaeda, it's me.
07:28I represented dozens of them.
07:31Bold statement.
07:33On September 17th, President Bush issued a secret memo
07:38that empowers the CIA to move against groups
07:43that might be planning terrorist activities.
07:46And this bit is maybe relevant to Afiyah
07:49and many others that you've represented.
07:51One day later, he signs into law the authorization
07:55for the use of military force.
07:57What does that allow the government to do?
07:59Well, it's a very good question what it really allows the government to do.
08:03What, unfortunately, it let the government do
08:07was institute a whole process of rendition to torture.
08:12Now, they call it extraordinary rendition,
08:15but I really don't know what ordinary rendition is.
08:17It's called kidnapping in normal language.
08:20And when I first went to Guantanamo Bay,
08:24I thought I was going to have a lot of explaining to do
08:27for a lot of people who really were captured
08:29on the battlefields of Afghanistan.
08:32And I got down there and I had a devil of a time
08:35finding people who had actually ever been on the battlefield of Afghanistan.
08:40And honestly, I couldn't understand it for a long time
08:43until I learned about the bounty program.
08:46And it turns out that the U.S. was offering a lot of money
08:50to people in Pakistan, particularly, but also Afghanistan,
08:54to turn in people who supposedly were fighters.
08:59And one thing I always like to ask my students is,
09:02you know, I'm offering you a quarter of a million dollars here
09:05to turn one of your colleagues in for being in Tora Bora in 2002.
09:12Are you going to take it?
09:14I mean, I like to think that I wouldn't, but hey,
09:17if my circumstances were different.
09:19Got to pay that mortgage off.
09:21I'm afraid that's a huge amount of money to people
09:25in certain parts of the world.
09:27And it's actually Musharraf, President Musharraf,
09:30who boasts in his book that more than half of the Guantanamo prisoners
09:34were literally sold to the U.S. for these bounties.
09:38And they weren't in Afghanistan.
09:41You know, a lot of the people, including someone like
09:43Mohammed Al-Gurani, age 14, was in Karachi,
09:46had never been to Afghanistan.
09:49But they were turned in for all this money,
09:51along with a story about how they were al-Qaeda.
09:54And thereby begins the vicious cycle.
09:58Right.
09:59Because if I were to say to you, Mariam, are you a member of al-Qaeda?
10:05What are you going to say?
10:07Absolutely not.
10:08Okay, now I'm going to slap you, I'm afraid.
10:11Are you a member of al-Qaeda?
10:13Well, it depends how many times you slap me.
10:15I've slapped you quite a few times.
10:17So they were tortured into confessions.
10:21And the people who are doing that torturing are not doing it
10:24because they think you're innocent.
10:26They're doing it because they think you're lying.
10:28And when you finally admit you are a member of al-Qaeda,
10:31they think, aha, we were right all along.
10:33And this is what was going on.
10:35And I think it's a big mistake to think that these are all evil torturers
10:40who are trying to take innocent people and put them in prison.
10:43It's much more dangerous than that.
10:45They're going to put you in prison,
10:47and then you've now confessed that you're al-Qaeda.
10:50And at that point, how are you going to prove you're not?
10:54Why did the Americans accept those stories?
10:58Well, because they said they'd paid good money.
11:01Someone said that Mariam is a member of al-Qaeda.
11:05I've now got you to admit you are.
11:08The Americans have got them to admit.
11:11Yeah, but we thought you were to begin with
11:13because some informant told us, normally from the Pakistan military.
11:17I think the intelligence people have been unbelievably naive.
11:24One of my guys, Binyam Mohamed, who some people will be familiar with,
11:29confessed when he was being abused that he knew how to build a nuclear weapon.
11:34Now, the Americans were obsessed with this, understandably.
11:37They're really paranoid about al-Qaeda getting nuclear weapons.
11:41But it wasn't until I got in as his lawyer
11:44that we were able to get the real story out,
11:46which was that he had said that you get uranium,
11:50you put it in a bucket, you swing it around your head for 45 minutes.
11:54That divides uranium-235 from uranium-239.
11:58Bob's your uncle, that's your weapons grade.
12:00He was tortured into saying that.
12:02He was tortured into saying that.
12:04But then this filters back through Chinese whispers to the White House,
12:08and John Ashcroft, Attorney General of the United States,
12:12interrupts his visit to Moscow to say,
12:14we've just solved the nuclear bomb plot.
12:16It's just shocking, but that's one example of literally hundreds of things
12:21that I've come across over the last few years.
12:24We go now from 2001 to 2003.
12:28You have 9-11.
12:30You have various changes the Bush administration puts into place
12:35in order to prosecute this war on terror.
12:39You have the invasion of Afghanistan.
12:41Where is Afia now?
12:43In 2002, Afia was in Boston, and she was living with her husband.
12:48There was an incident where Amjad, the husband,
12:51had bought various things on the Internet,
12:54which included night vision goggles.
12:57Now, he's Muslim, and I speak again as an American when I say,
13:01and I'm sorry about this, I really think it's awful,
13:04the prejudice we had against Muslims after 9-11 was awful.
13:10The FBI went by Amjad and Afia's apartment,
13:14confronted Amjad with the stuff he'd bought.
13:18He says, oh, well, I'm a hunter, and this is where I get them.
13:22And they took that at face value.
13:24I'm amazed by that.
13:25I'm amazed he wasn't arrested on the spot, actually,
13:27under those circumstances.
13:29But all of that went into the files that would later get reviewed
13:34by some intelligence person somewhere in Washington.
13:39And all of this begins to add up to a portrait, allegedly,
13:44of Afia and her husband.
13:46She has three children at this point.
13:48She had two at that point.
13:49She had two at that point.
13:51So then how does she go from living there to being back in Pakistan?
13:56She wanted to go back to her family in Karachi.
14:00Amjad hadn't finished his medical degree,
14:02so he wasn't quite so keen he wanted to finish it.
14:05But they went back to Karachi,
14:08and that's where their marriage really fell apart.
14:12They got into a very bitter divorce.
14:15She was then pregnant with their third child, Sulayman,
14:18who was born in September 2002.
14:21She's taking a taxi to Karachi airport.
14:24They're going to fly to Islamabad because she has plans now for her career.
14:30As they're going to the airport,
14:32and Afia really blames herself for getting the taxi to take a back route.
14:36But it's then that these cars surround their car,
14:39and what happens is this.
14:43So there are all these goons pull first the two older kids out.
14:48There's Ahmed, age six, Mariam, age three,
14:51and they put them in another car.
14:53Ahmed recalls, but he was a very traumatized six-year-old,
14:56he recalls looking out through the back window
14:59and seeing Sulayman, the six-month-old,
15:04on the ground with blood surrounding him,
15:07thinking that he'd fallen on his head.
15:10That's actually the only source we have for the fact that Sulayman may be dead,
15:16and we don't know for sure.
15:18But at the same time, Afia's dragged out of the car herself
15:21and put in another car.
15:23She's the only person we have a detailed history of
15:27who was put through the whole rendition-to-torture program
15:30by the Americans who was a woman.
15:32And I thought originally, you know,
15:35there's going to be a lot of explaining to do about what happened to these people.
15:39But this is ultimately the reality,
15:43and these are the figures of the United States government, not me.
15:47There have been 780 prisoners in Guantanamo.
15:50If you set aside the nine people who sadly died there, that's 771.
15:56There are only 13 of them who haven't been cleared as being effectively innocent.
16:04So 99.5% of the people in Guantanamo Bay have been released,
16:09for which you need a finding by the six top intelligence agencies of America
16:14that they're no threat to anyone.
16:16They're not the worst of the worst terrorists in the world.
16:19These are the American statistics.
16:21The catastrophe of our intelligence in Guantanamo,
16:24and I've seen a lot of this over the last 20 years, is just unbelievably bad.
16:30Americans were offering, as you said, huge amounts of money for people,
16:34and with our fear I think it was $55,000
16:37reportedly paid to people allied with then-Pakistan President Musharraf
16:43to abduct her and turn her over to the Americans.
16:46But as you said, the thing that distinguishes her case from the others is the children.
16:50She had three small children with her.
16:53The children is really something.
16:55So Ahmed, who I've talked to about this, he's now 26 and he's a qualified doctor,
17:01a really delightful young man, but deeply traumatized.
17:05And he recounts how he was taken to a dark room,
17:08a really dirty place, held there for a little bit.
17:12Then he's a U.S. national, right, because he was born in the U.S.
17:16Then he's taken by the U.S. a thousand kilometers from where he was in Karachi to Kabul
17:23and put in a prison, and he's in a prison for the next five years.
17:29You know, what are you doing?
17:32I just think this is so deranged that America would do that to him.
17:36Then you've got Mariam, who was three, and she was taken again to a dark room,
17:43a separate dark room from Ahmed, and then she was taken up to Kabul,
17:47where she was forcibly adopted into a family of American white Christian people,
17:55Josh and Natalie, who had to have been intelligence agents there in Afghanistan,
18:01and she's held by them in adoption.
18:05But she's called Fatima, and she's held there for seven years.
18:09They were taken from Pakistan to Afghanistan.
18:15Afia is imprisoned.
18:17Ahmed, who's five or six years old, is put in a juvenile prison.
18:21He's told his name is Ali and to never speak of any of this again.
18:25And Mariam becomes Fatima and is adopted by a white American couple living in Kabul.
18:33The apparent theory that you're better off being a white Christian American
18:37than a Pakistani Muslim of a certain color.
18:41Afia now is in prison.
18:45Well, you say that, but the Americans deny it.
18:48The Americans deny it.
18:50The Americans deny to this day that Afia was in a secret prison in Afghanistan.
18:57Where was she?
18:59According to the U.S., they have all these different things.
19:02It's all nonsense.
19:03But they say she was wandering around Pakistan with her children
19:08and, in fact, was living in a place called Nazimabad in Karachi for five years,
19:14which is just a hop, skip and a jump from where her family lives.
19:18Total nonsense.
19:20So the Americans are making false claims about her.
19:23There's a version where they're saying she was just wandering around aimlessly.
19:27But she is, during this time, in Bagram.
19:31Well, the only reason we know that is because I've been there several times
19:36and found a bunch of prisoners who were in Bagram with her.
19:39The first one was a guy called Salim Kutche.
19:42Salim came forward because he's been itching to tell someone this for the last 15 years.
19:48So he told me the whole story about how he was in the isolation place
19:52and Afia was being held in this little wooden box.
19:56How did he know it was her?
19:58Well, this was obviously my question,
20:00and I started talking to all sorts of other people who claimed the same thing.
20:05So first, she was Pakistani, spoke Urdu, everyone recognized that.
20:09Second, what happened was that, and I've been to Bagram
20:14and I've talked to lots of people who were there at the time,
20:17that there were no showers and toilets in the ISO area,
20:21and so they had to take this woman from there to the showers.
20:25They would put a towel over her head, but a lot of the time that came off and they all saw her.
20:30And so they were really upset about this.
20:33The male prisoners were upset that when this woman,
20:38that she was there or that they were able to identify that she was even there.
20:42And then what happened is when they got out, they saw pictures of her
20:47and a whole series of independent people recognized her as the woman that had seen them.
20:52There's no question she was abducted with the children.
20:55We have a recording of one of the officers who did it.
20:58He didn't know he was being recorded at the time, but he boasted about everything they did.
21:03So then for the Americans to be telling the truth, they have to have let her go.
21:07That never happened.
21:08She's told me what happened to her, and she was later then taken to a women's prison,
21:14a women's place, it was some dark site, where she was in a room with two Afghan women.
21:20And, you know, this is where it gets really, really awful.
21:23She was raped by the guards. They were Afghan guards.
21:27She describes getting with the other women, tying their hands together.
21:31So when this guard came in the next day, they took him down and beat him up.
21:36You know, more power to her, frankly.
21:38But then she was put in an isolation cell and the abuse got worse.
21:42While she was in those prisons, the U.S. had a one-way glass
21:48and they were seemingly abusing children on the other side of the glass
21:53that she was meant to think were her children.
21:56The Spanish Inquisition 500 years ago knew that second-degree torture was worse than first-degree.
22:01You know, you can torture me. I'm not happy about it.
22:04But if you do something to my son in front of me, my child, you know, that's far worse.
22:11And Afia told me about this. She said, I had to stop them doing this.
22:15And in the end, the only thing I could think to do was pretend I didn't care
22:20because I thought that was the only way to stop them abusing those children in front of me.
22:25And what a place to be in, to have that thought going through your head.
22:29In Part 2 of this episode, civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith
22:33talks more about the injustices around the imprisonment of his client, Afia Siddiqui,
22:38and how he says that through sheer luck, she barely escaped an attempt on her life.
22:44This is a very important element. Is it a discovery you've made recently that could be very important in this case?
22:49She was going to go to Ghazni on this bus.
22:53She was going to be tarred as a suicide bomber, and she was going to be killed there.
22:58To watch the conclusion of this episode, click on the link in the description.