How they see us: Harsh sentence for a Pakistani

last updated 8 January 2015

The U.S. judicial system has revealed itself to be a tool of the “ruling cabal,” said Mujahid Kamran in the Islamabad Nation. “In recent years, U.S. courts have given decisions that remind one of Third World courts.” Evidence of serious wrongdoing by the U.S. government—including kidnapping and torture—is consistently ruled inadmissible on the grounds that “state secrets” could be compromised. That was the case at the trial of U.S.-trained Pakistani neuroscientist Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, who was sentenced last week to 86 years in prison for trying to kill an FBI agent. The U.S. court heard that Siddiqui had been arrested in Afghanistan in 2008, and that when agents tried to question her, she grabbed one of their guns and began shooting. What it didn’t hear, though, was that for the previous five years, Siddiqui had been missing. Abducted in 2003 from a street in Karachi, Pakistan, she was held at the notorious U.S. prison camp at Bagram Air Base, where hundreds of people have been “routinely tortured.” Over the years, prisoners heard her scream as she was “raped repeatedly” and otherwise abused. Her conviction, which has prompted demonstrations in cities throughout Pakistan, makes a mockery of the U.S. Constitution.

It’s not so clear-cut, said Kamila Hyat in the Islamabad News. Siddiqui herself insists that she was not tortured. Pro-Taliban elements here in Pakistan have been lying about her abduction, torture, and other claims in order to inflame anti-American passions. To read some accounts, you’d think Siddiqui was the innocent victim of a show trial at which “no evidence” was presented. In fact, there was a great deal of proof that she had joined an extremist movement while she was a student at MIT in Boston. When she was arrested in Afghanistan in 2008, she was carrying instructions on making bombs as well as a list of New York targets, including the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. The true lesson of the case is not that the U.S. has it in for Muslims, but that pious Muslims are being recruited into terrorist groups on “many campuses in the U.K., the U.S., and presumably elsewhere.” Why is it that “the best and brightest in our land” turn to militancy?

That is just one of the difficult questions Pakistanis should be asking themselves, said The News in an editorial. The Siddiqui case has domestic political implications for us, as well. We still do not know, for instance, who was involved in the alleged abduction of Siddiqui from Karachi in 2003. There’s a strong possibility that she “was handed over to the U.S. authorities by our own agents.” Yet even assuming she’s guilty, Pakistanis are justifiably furious at the unreasonably harsh sentence, said the Lahore Daily Times. A sentence of 86 years would have been excessive even for murder, and Siddiqui killed nobody. It’s also not surprising that pro-Taliban agitators are exploiting the case to whip up fervor against America. With this unjust verdict, the court has delivered “a crushing blow” to U.S. efforts to win Pakistani “hearts and minds.”