USA v Aafia Siddiqui

Cageprisoners Inside the Courtroom Coverage

by Petra Bartosiewicz

Last 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 case is expected to go the jury for deliberation by the end of this week.

January 27, 2009 (DAY 7)

The Pakistani Ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, arrived at the courthouse this morning to monitor the progress of the trial. “You are very welcome in this courtroom, your Excellency,” said Judge Richard Berman, who had a brief private meeting with the ambassador before jurors were brought into the courtroom. Siddiqui’s defense attorneys have received a reported $2 million from the government of Pakistan for the case, and greeted the ambassador as the day’s proceedings began. Haqqani sat in a special chair brought into the spectator gallery and observed about an hour and a half of the testimony before leaving. Siddiqui, who yesterday was ejected from the courtroom after once again announcing her boycott of the trial, did not attend the proceedings today.

The prosecution rested their case this morning with no additional witnesses, and defense attorneys began to present their case. Key testimony came from expert witness William Tobin, a forensic metallurgical consultant who worked at the FBI for 24 years and investigated high profile cases such as the JFK assassination and the crash of TWA flight 800. Tobin, who said he has testified in some 225 trials, almost every one of those for the prosecution, examined photos and videotape of the room in Ghazni where the shooting occurred, with a particular focus on what the government has alleged are two bullet holes from rounds shot by the M-4 automatic rifle that Siddiqui is accused of seizing from a U.S. Army warrant officer. Tobin told jurors that he could say with “scientific certainty” that the two holes in the wall were not made by SS109 rounds used in an M-4 automatic rifle, adding that he did not believe the holes were the result of any bullets at all. Tobin described one of the tests he performed, which involved firing an SS109 round into a surface similar to the wall in the Ghazni police station. The test surface was left with cracks and significant damage around the bullet hole, which he described as “spalling damage” that was the resulted of energy transfered from the bullet to the surface of impact. The photos and video of the wall in the Ghazni police station, he said, demonstrated no such “spalling damage.” Tobin also described how the angle from which the gun was shot would have had a significant impact on the amount of damage to the wall, with the least amount of damage resulting from a bullet that would hit the wall at a perpendicular angle. But such a scenario is unlikely given that the marks are located near the ceiling level in the room. Tobin also said that he did not see the kind of shrapnel damage he would have expected on the ceiling itself.

Tobin said SS109 rounds are designed to shatter but that the part of the projectile known as the “penetrator” should remain intact. No bullets or bullet fragments were found inside the wall by the FBI investigators who were on the scene in Ghazni. Asked whether the penetrator could have bounced back into the room, as prosecutors suggested in earlier testimony, Tobin said that was unlikely. “If the laws of physics in Afghanistan are the same as here, it would just fall to the base of the wall,” he said. Tobin also described the difference one could expect from the impact of an SS109 round versus a 9mm round from a handgun like the one that the chief warrant officer used to shoot Siddiqui. “It’s apples and oranges,” said Tobin. “The 9mm is a slow and stodgy round, while the SS109 is going at almost three times the velocity.” The impact from a 9mm bullet would cause far less damage than the impact from an SS109 round, said Tobin, yet the room at the Ghazni police station showed significant damage to the wall at the spot where the 9mm bullet was confirmed to have hit but none where the SS109 round supposedly hit. “You’d expect to see substantially more damage than shown in the photo,” said Tobin of the marks where the government has alleged the rounds from the M-4 rifle hit.

“You have no scientific doubt that these were not from an M-4?” asked defense attorney Charles Swift.

“That’s correct,” said Tobin.

On cross examination by Assistant U.S. Attorney David Rody, Tobin said he didn’t find it credible that two rounds from an M-4 could be fired in an enclosed space and not leave any forensic evidence. When asked about the eyewitness accounts, Tobin said he did not rely on witness information, citing the TWA flight 800 investigation he participated in, where the testimony of over 200 witnesses “totally contradicted the laws of physics.” Witnesses reported seeing a fireball that appeared to be moving towards the plane just before the explosion, which was interpreted by many as a missile. The cause of the explosion was eventually proven to be the result of a short circuit that set off one of the plane’s fuel tanks. “I don’t rely on witness testimony,” said Tobin. “I just don’t.”

The question of whether or not Siddiqui will take the stand in her own defense will likely be resolved tomorrow, when Judge Richard Berman is expected to rule on a request from defense attorneys that she be barred from testifying. In a seven page letter sent to the judge yesterday, her attorneys cited her mental instability and frequent outbursts during the trial, and said they have an ethical obligation to “safeguard her interests.” The attorneys requested that the judge confer with Siddiqui himself before making a final determination, but said if she is permitted to testify that statements she made while recovering from the gunshot wounds she incurred in Ghazni should not be admissible. At the time Siddiqui was in Bagram Hospital and “under the influence of various medications, in duress from being separated from her child and family and physically restrained in a hospital bed by four-point restraints,” they wrote. The attorneys said they believe that if Siddiqui does take the stand she is unlikely to remain focused on the criminal case at hand. “To the extent that Dr. Siddiqui has conferred with defense counsel about what issues she intends to address should she testify,” her attorneys wrote, “her ability to bring world peace, especially between the United States and the Taliban, appears to be the primary, if not sole, topic.”

Prosecutors asked the judge uphold Siddiqui’s Fifth Amendment right to testify and argued that any statements she made while at Bagram should be admissible. “Defense counsel recognize, as they must, that the decision to testify is a ‘personal right’ that is waivable only by the defendant,” prosecutors wrote. “Nonetheless, they claim that the Court should take what they acknowledge to be the ‘unprecedented’ step of preventing the defendant from testifying on her own behalf.” Prosecutors also argued that the issue of Siddiqui’s diminished mental capacity should not come into play since the court deemed Siddiqui competent to stand trial after a lengthy court-ordered psychiatric evaluation last year. They agreed with the defense, however, that the judge should speak with Siddiqui before he makes a final decision. That meeting may take place tomorrow morning before jurors return to hear the case.

The trial continues Thursday, Jan 28, with Day 8, 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 of Aafia Siddiqui’s case, “The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes its Enemies Disappear,” 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.

(taken from cageprisoners.com)