For those unaware of who Aafia Siddiqui is, she's a Pakistani Neuroscientist, kidnapped and held prisoner and tortured (along with her children) in American "Black sites" for many years, who was eventually put on show trial in the U.S recently and sentenced to 86 years in prison, may the perpetrators of these crimes against her suffer a long, slow and painful torment.

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Taliban seek prisoner swap for aid worker

A TALIBAN commander has offered to exchange a kidnapped British aid worker for a Pakistani scientist who was jailed for 86 years for attempting to murder US troops, according to a news agency with links to the insurgents.

The commander, Mohammad Osman, said he had kidnapped the 36-year-old British woman and was demanding an exchange for Aafia Siddiqui, 38, a neuroscientist who was jailed in America last week for trying to kill troops who were interrogating her in Afghanistan.

Osman told the Afghan Islamic Press, based in Peshawar in northern Pakistan: ''We are lucky that we abducted this British woman soon after the ruthless ruling by an American court on Aafia Siddiqui. We will demand the release of Aafia Siddiqui in exchange for her.''

That demand came as the top US commander in Afghanistan said that high-level Taliban leaders had reached out to senior Afghan government officials in the context of starting reconciliation discussions.

General David Petraeus, in a meeting with reporters after a tour of the largely US-run detention facility at Parwan in Afghanistan, said ''high-level Taliban leaders'' were making efforts to establish contact with senior members of the Afghan government.

The conditions of Afghan President Hamid Karzai ''are very clear, very established and, certainly, we support them as we did in Iraq, as the UK did in Northern Ireland; this is how you end these kinds of insurgencies'', General Petraeus said, referring to the conditions among others that the Taliban respect the country's constitution and lay down arms.

US support for the process is in part a recognition that ''Oh, by the way, you are not going to kill or capture your way out of an industrial-strength insurgency'', General Petraeus said, underscoring the scale of Taliban activity.

Although on its face a peace deal with the Taliban appears to be a necessary ingredient for the withdrawal of international troops, a reconciliation with the insurgents is also so controversial among many Afghans that the US is in a delicate position in supporting it.

At this point, though, it seems there is an acknowledgment that it would not be possible to win against an insurgency of this scale and that a peace deal might be a major part of any exit strategy. (Reality hits home)

The kidnapped woman, whose identity Britain's Daily Telegraph has learnt but agreed to conceal to protect her safety, had recently returned to Afghanistan after ''falling in love'' with it, friends said.

Her father, an engineer, and mother, a former secretary, who live in Scotland, said: ''We have been advised not to say anything by the Foreign Office. I think something should be issued and we are awaiting advice.''

Friends said she is ''very quiet and calm'' and likely to keep her cool, despite the circumstances.

She was snatched along with three co-workers, all thought to be Afghans, as they drove along a remote road between Asadabad, the provincial capital, and Jalalabad in the north-eastern province of Kunar, close to the Pakistan border, on Sunday.

The woman was employed by Development Alternatives, a US company that assists in the distribution of aid. Some have questioned why the company sent staff to eastern Kunar, an area considered unsafe.

The latest kidnap comes just a month after Dr Karen Woo, a British aid worker, was shot dead with nine colleagues in Afghanistan.

Source: The Age

Injustice in the age of Obama

Since being the defendant in about six trials after I was arrested for protesting the Iraq and Afghanistan occupations, it’s my experience that the police lie. Period.

However the lies don’t stop at street law enforcement level. From lies about WMD and connections to "al Qaeda," almost every institution of so-called authority - the Pentagon, State Department, CIA, FBI, all the way up to the Oval Office and back down - lie. Not white lies, but big, Mother of all BS (MOAB) lies that lead to the destruction of innocent lives. I.F Stone was most definitely on the ball when he proclaimed, "Governments lie".

Having clarified that, I would now like to examine a case that should be enshrined in the travesty of the US Justice Hall of Shame.

In February of this year, Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani mother of three, was convicted in US Federal (kangaroo) Court of seven counts, including two counts of "attempted murder of an American." On September 23, Judge Berman, who displayed an open bias against Dr. Siddiqui, sentenced her to 86 years in prison.

The tapestry of lies about Dr. Siddiqui - a cognitive neuroscientist, schooled at MIT and Brandeis - was woven during the Bush regime but fully maintained during her trial and sentencing this year by the Obama (in)Justice Department.

Before 9/11/2001, Aafia lived in Massachusetts with her husband, also a Pakistani citizen, and their two children. According to all reports, she was a quietly pious Muslim (which is still not a crime here in the States), who hosted play dates for her children. She was a good student who studied hard and maintained an exemplary record, causing little harm to anything, let alone anyone.

After 9/11, when she was pregnant with her third child, she encouraged her husband to move back to Pakistan to avoid the backlash against her Muslim children - which was a very prescient thing to do considering the Islamophobia that has only increased in this country since then.

Tortured 'truth'

Following the move to Pakistan, Dr. Siddiqui and her husband divorced. Her life took a horrendous turn justly after. While Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) - supposed mastermind of the 9/11 plot - was being water-boarded by the CIA 183 times in one month, he gave Dr. Siddiqui up as a member of al-Qaeda. Was this a case of stolen identity, or was Mohammed just saying random words like you or I would to stop the torture?

There is some disputed "intelligence" that Aafia had married KSM’s nephew, a tenuous allegation at best, and even so, guilt by association has no place in the hallowed US legal system.

Following KSM’s torture-induced 'insights', Dr. Siddiqui was listed by Bush’s Justice Department as one of the seven most dangerous al-Qaeda operatives in the world. A mother of three equipped with a lethal ability to 'thin-slice' your cognitive personality in seconds. If alleged association and a healthy interest in neuro-psychology are the definitive hallmarks of a 'terrorist operative,' then Malcolm Gladwell better start making some phone calls to Crane, Poole and Schmidt.

A culture of falsehoods

Face it, we all know that since 9/11, there have been numerous false "terror" alerts and lies leading to the capture and torture of hundreds of innocent individuals - and the heinous treatment we have all witnessed to from Abu Ghraib. Additionally, we are supposed to believe that multi-war criminal, Colin Powell, was "fooled" by faulty intelligence so much so that he paved the way for the invasion of Iraq by his false testimony at the UN but we are also supposed to unquestioningly believe the US intelligence apparatus when they lie about others such as Dr. Siddiqui.

In any case, in a bizarre scenario - to make a very long story short - Dr. Siddiqui and her three children disappeared for five years from 2003 to 2008, resurfacing in Ghazni, Afghanistan with her oldest child, a son who was then 11. She claimed that for the years she was missing, she was being held in various Pakistani and US prisons being tortured and repeatedly raped. Many prisoners, including Yvonne Ridley, maintain she was incarcerated in Bagram AFB and tortured for at least part of the five missing years.

After Dr. Siddiqui resurfaced, she was arrested and taken to an Afghan police station where four Americans - two military and two FBI agents - rushed to "question" her through interpreters. The FBI and military, claim that they were taken to a room that had a curtain at one end and that they did not know that Dr. Siddiqui was lying asleep on a bed at the other side of the curtain. As you read below it will become blatantly obvious that personnel involved from both institutions totally fabricated their stories.

TBC...

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Yeh nice way to speak about a poor lady who's been tortured and held in black prisons for the past 6 years.

Right on Mr. Dynamic Lifter... true to form.