This week the long awaited trial of Aafia Siddiqui began in a federal courtroom in Manhattan. Her case has been one of the most baffling in the annals of post-9/11 terrorism prosecutions. Siddiqui, as regular readers of this website know, is a 37-year-old, MIT-educated neuroscientist, who lived in the U.S. for ten years before mysteriously vanishing from Karachi, her hometown, in 2003, along with her three children, two of whom are American born. For five years her whereabouts remained unknown, while rumors swirled that she was an Al Qaeda operative, and that she had married Ammar al Baluchi, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and one of the five accused 9/11 plotters expected to face trial in the U.S. In July 2008 she was picked up in Ghazni, Afghanistan on suspicion of being a suicide bomber. The following day, as a team of U.S. soldiers and FBI agents arrived to question her at the police station where she was being held, she allegedly managed to get hold of an M-4 automatic rifle belonging to one of the soldiers, and, according to prosecutors, she opened fire. She hit no one but was herself hit in the abdomen by return fire. What is known is that the U.S. considered Siddiqui to be someone connected to a number of high level terrorism suspects. They say she went on the run and remained underground during her missing years. But human rights groups have long held that Siddiqui is no extremist and believe she was illegally detained and interrogated by Pakistani intelligence at the behest of the U.S. She now faces charges of attempted murder. Her trial is expected to last two weeks.
January 21, 2009 (DAY 3)
Government prosecutors continued to present their case today, shifting their focus from the testimony of eyewitnesses to the Ghazni shooting, to how evidence at the scene was secured.The day's testimony was dominated by FBI Special Agent Gordon Hurley, who made three trips to Ghazni in July, August and October 2008 to secure evidence at the scene of the shooting and interview U.S. and Afghan witnesses. Assistant U.S. Attorney Jenna Dabbs showed jurors numerous photographs and a video of the room on the second floor of the Afghan police station where the shooting took place, and a photo of the cell where Siddiqui was held when she was first brought to the station on July 17. Hurley's first trip was relatively short, but he said he took statements from witnesses at the scene, including Captain Snyder and his translator Ahmad Gul (both of whom gave testimony on day one of this trial), Staff Sergeant Lamont Williams, FBI Special Agents Eric Negron and John Jefferson, and the chief warrant officer. He did not conduct interviews with any Afghans during that first visit. While in Ghazni in July, Hurley also made a preliminary investigation of the room where the shooting took place. He said that on this visit U.S. Army Captain John Kendall gave him custody of both the M-4 automatic rifle that prosecutors say Siddiqui used to fire at the U.S. team and the 9 mm revolver that the chief warrant officer used to shoot her. The jurors were invited to handle both weapons as they were passed around the jury box. Hurley estimated the M-4 weighed 7.5 pounds and possibly as much as 9 pounds with the various scopes that had been attached to it at the time of the shooting. He said he left the three sighting scopes with the army after Kendall told him they did not have replacement devices and needed them for their ongoing combat operations.
Hurley returned to Ghazni again in August 2008 to conduct further interviews with witnesses, including Afghan military, civilian and police officials, as well as U.S. soldiers. He wanted to establish an evidentiary "chain of custody" for the evidence seized at the time of the shooting, which included not just the weapons but also the documents and other materials Siddiqui was allegedly arrested with. Hurley estimated he and his partner interviewed as many as 30 individuals. He was looking for any additional eyewitnesses and for friends or relatives of Siddiqui. He went to the local bazaar in Ghazni and interviewed shopkeepers there. On Aug 25 during this trip he also returned to the Ghazni police compound to do a more thorough investigation of the crime scene, where he made a more extensive examination of the room, including the area where bullets from the gun Siddiqui allegedly fired were thought to be lodged. Despite several probes, including removing a chunk of the wall itself, they were unable to locate any bullets from the area. Hurley inspected the back area where Siddiqui was standing just before the shooting and found a "projectile," or portion of a bullet there.
On cross examination, defense attorney Dawn Cardi questioned why Hurley did not return to Ghazni sooner after his first visit to continue his investigation and in order, for example, to retrieve evidence like the curtain that divided the room. Hurley said it wasn't easy to move around Afghanistan and that he hadn't tasked anyone with retrieving the curtain because there was "no one to call." He said that he and his partner returned as soon as they could get permission but that they didn't ask for any special dispensation to get there faster. Cardi also questioned Hurley about the inconsistencies in the various statements of the witnesses and why he didn't do more to resolve them. "Eyewitnesses see things very differently," said Hurley. "You don't want to force people to make their statements match." He rejected the suggestion that he had not been skeptical enough in receiving the accounts from the U.S. personnel he interviewed. "We're supposed to be skeptics," he said.
One of the major discrepancies in the testimony so far has been the question of whether the warrant officer looked behind the curtain before the shooting. Hurley recalled that FBI Special Agent John Jefferson said the chief warrant officer had checked behind the curtain just before the shooting and given the "all clear." FBI Special Agent Eric Negron, he said, told him that he recalled the warrant officer "glanced behind the curtain and saw no one was there." But Hurley could not remember what the other witnesses he interviewed said. He also said he didn't recall speaking with FBI agents about a letter the Afghan intelligence officials supposedly asked them to sign to absolve them of responsibility for the shooting (see day 2 testimony from Special Agent John Jefferson).
Hurley later said that securing the evidence at the scene was a relatively low priority for the U.S. military in Ghazni Province at the time. "They were doing other stuff, right?" asked Dabbs. "Fighting a war," said Hurley.
Although attendance at the trial dropped sharply after the first day, security has increasingly tightened as the trial has progressed. A metal detector was installed outside the courtroom door on the second day to screen all individuals sitting in the public gallery. Jurors were told not to make any adverse inferences from the added security. Today jurors were also required to pass through the metal detector and security guards made detailed searches of all bags brought into the courtroom. Members of the general public for the past two days have also been required to show photo identifications and court security guards have noted the name and address of each individual. At the conclusion of today's proceedings, defense attorney Charles Swift made note of the identification requirement and said that it is not in keeping with Siddiqui's right to a free and open trial. The judge said he would look into it, though attendees at the trial said a member of the court security detail told them the measures were on the direct order of the judge.
Tomorrow Jan 22, DAY 4, USA v. Siddiqui.
Petra Bartosiewicz is a freelance journalist who has written for numerous publications, including The Nation, Mother Jones, and Salon.com. Her forthcoming book on terrorism trials in the U.S., The Best Terrorists We Could Find, will be published by Nation Books early next year. You can find her investigation ofAafia Siddiqui's case in the November 2009 issue of Harper's magazine (www.harpers.org) and at her website www.petrabart.com. She can be reached at petrabart@petrabart.com.
