How America Makes Its Enemies Disappear

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When I frst read the U.S.government s compla in tagainst Aafa Siddiqui, who isawaiting trial in a Brooklyndetention center on charges oattempting to murder a groupo U.S. Army ofcers and FBIagents in Aghanistan, thecase it described was so impos-

sibly convolutedand yet soabsurdly incriminatingthat Isimply assumed she was inno-cent. According to the com-plaint, on the evening o July 17,2008, several local policemendiscovered Siddiqui and a youngboy loitering about a publicsquare in Ghazni. She was car-rying instructions or creatingweapons involving biologicalmaterial, descriptions o U.S.military assets, and numerous

unnamed chemical substancesin gel and liquid orm that weresealed in bottles and glass jars.Siddiqui, an MIT-trained neuroscien-tist who lived in the United States oreleven years, had vanished rom herhometown in Pakistan in 2003, alongwith all three o her children, two owhom were U.S. citizens. The com-plaint does not address where she was

those fve years or why she suddenlydecided to emerge into a public squareoutside Pakistan and ar rom theUnited States, nor does it address whyshe would do so in the company o herAmerican son. Various reports hadher married to a high-level Al Qaedaoperative, running diamonds out oLiberia or Osama bin Laden, andabetting the entry o terrorists into

the United States. But those reports

were countered by rumors thatSiddiqui actually had spent theprevious fve years in the mawo the U.S. intelligence sys-temthat she was a ghost pris-oner, kidnapped by Pakistanispies, held in secret detentionat a U.S. military prison, inter-rogated until she could provide

no urther intelligence, thenspat back into the world in themanner most likely to renderher story implausible. Thesedueling narratives o terroristintrigue and imperial over-reach were only urther con-ounded when Siddiqui fnallyappeared beore a judge in aManhattan courtroom on Au-gust 5. Now, two weeks aterher capture, she was bandagedand doubled over in a wheel-

chair, barely able to speak,becausesomehowshe hadbeen shot in the stomach by

one o the very soldiers she standsaccused o attempting to murder.

It is clear that the CIA and the FBIbelieved Aafa Siddiqui to be a poten-tial source o intelligence and, as such,a prized commodity in the global waron terror. Every other aspect o theSiddiqui case, though, is shrouded inrumor and denial, with the result thatwe do not know, and may never know,

whether her detention has made the

Petra Bartosiewicz is a writer living inBrooklyn. Her last story for Harpers Mag-azine, I.O.U. One Terrorist, appeared in

the August 2005 issue.

THE INTELLIGENCEFACTORY

How America makes its enemies disappearBy Petra Bartosiewicz

R E P O R T

42 HARPERS MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2009 Illustration by Daniel Bejar


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REPORT 43

United States any saer. Even the par-ticulars o the arrest itsel, which tookplace beore a crowd o witnesses nearGhaznis main mosque, are in dispute.According to the complaint, Siddiquiwas detained not because she waswanted by the FBI but simply because

she was loitering in a suspicious man-ner; she did not speak the local lan-guage and she was not escorted by anadult male. What drove her to risk suchconspicuous behavior has not beenrevealed. When I later hired a localreporter in Aghanistan to re-interviewseveral witnesses, the arresting ofcer,Abdul Ghani, said Siddiqui had beencarrying a box with some sort ochemicals, but a shopkeeper namedFarhad said the police had ound onlya lot o papers. Hekmat Ullah, who

happened to be passing by at the timeo her arrest, said Siddiqui was attack-ing everyone who got close to heradetail that is not mentioned in thecomplaint. A man named Mirwais,who had come to the mosque that dayto pray, said he saw police handcuSiddiqui, but Massoud Nabizada, theowner o a local pharmacy, said thepolice had no handcus, so they usedher scar to tie her hands. What every-one appears to agree on is this: an un-known person called the police to warn

that a possible suicide bomber was loi-tering outside a mosque; the policearrested Siddiqui and her son; and,Aghan sovereignty notwithstanding,they then dispatched the suspiciousmaterials, whatever they were, to thenearest U.S. military base.

The events o the ollowing day arealso subject to dispute. According tothe complaint, a U.S. Army captainand a warrant ofcer, two FBI agents,and two military interpreters came toquestion Siddiqui at Ghaznis police

headquarters. The team was shown toa meeting room that was partitioned bya yellow curtain. None o the UnitedStates personnel were aware, the com-plaint states, that Siddiqui was beingheld, unsecured, behind the curtain.

No explanation is oered as to why noone thought to look behind it. Thegroup sat down to talk and, in anotherodd lapse o vigilance, the WarrantOfcer placed his United States ArmyM-4 rie on the oor to his right nextto the curtain, near his right oot. Sid-

diqui, like a villain in a stage play,

reached rom behind the curtain andpulled the three-oot rie to her side.She unlatched the saety. She pulledthe curtain slightly back and pointedthe gun directly at the head o thecaptain. One o the interpreters sawher. He lunged or the gun. Siddiqui

shouted, Get the uck out o here!and fred twice. She hit no one. As theinterpreter wrestled her to the ground,the warrant ofcer drew his sidearmand fred approximately two roundsinto Siddiquis abdomen. She collapsed,still struggling, then ell unconscious.

The authorities in Aghanistan de-scribe a dierent series o events. Thegovernor o Ghazni Province, UsmanUsmani, told my local reporter that theU.S. team had demanded to take overcustody o Siddiqui. The governor re-

used. He could not release Siddiqui, heexplained, until ofcials rom the coun-terterrorism department in Kabul ar-rived to investigate. He proposed acompromise: the U.S. team could inter-view Siddiqui, but she would remain atthe station. In a Reuters interview, how-ever, a senior Ghazni police ofcersuggested that the compromise did nothold. The U.S. team arrived at the po-lice station, he said, and demandedcustody o Siddiqui, the Aghan ofcersreused, and the U.S. team proceeded

to disarm them. Then, or reasons un-explained, Siddiqui hersel somehowentered the scene. The U.S. team,thinking that she had explosives andwould attack them as a suicide bomber,shot her and took her.

Siddiquis own version o theshooting is less complicated. As sheexplained it to a delegation o Paki-stani senators who came to Texas tovisit her in prison a ew months aterher arrest, she never touched anyonesgun, nor did she shout at anyone or

make any threats. She simply stoodup to see who was on the other sideo the curtain and startled the sol-diers. One o them shouted, She isloose, and then someone shot her.When she regained consciousness sheheard someone else say, We couldlose our jobs.

Siddiquis trial is scheduled or this November. The charges against herstem solely rom the shooting incidentitsel, not rom any alleged act o ter-rorism. The prosecutors provide no

explanation or how a scientist, mother,

and wie came to be charged as a dan-gerous elon. Nor do they account orher missing years, or her two otherchildren, who still are missing. What isknown is that the United States want-ed her in 2003, and it wanted her again

in 2008, and now no one

can explain why.

As the global war on terror en-ters its ninth year, under the leader-ship o its second commander in chie,certain ongoing assumptions havegained the orce o common wisdom.One o them, as Barack Obama ex-plained in a major policy speech lastMay, is that we have entered a newera that will present new challengesto our application o the law and re-quire new tools to protect the Ameri-

can people. Another, as Obamamade clear in the same speech, is thatthe purpose o these new tools andlaws is to prevent attacks instead osimply prosecuting those who try tocarry them out. These positions areappealing, but they ail to addresswhat might be thought o as an un-derlying economic disequilibrium.The continued political appetite or aglobal war on terror has led to a com-modiication o actionable intelli-gence, which is a product, chiey, o

human prisoners like Aafa Siddiqui.Because this war, by defnition, has nophysical or temporal boundaries, thedemand or such intelligence has nolimit. But the world contains a rela-tively small number o terrorists andan even smaller number o terroristplots. Our demand or intelligence aroutstrips the supply o prisoners.Where the United States itsel hasbeen unable to meet that demand,thereore, it has embraced a solutionthat is the essence o globalization.

We outsource the work to countries,like Pakistan, whose political circum-stances allow them to produce prison-ers with ar greater efciency.

What the CIA and the FBI under-stand as an acquisition solution, how-ever, others see as a human-rightsdebacle. Just as thousands o politicaldissidents, suspected criminals, andenemies o the state were disap-peared rom Latin America over thecourse o several decades o CIA-unded dirty wars, so too have hun-

dreds o persons o interest around


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44 HARPERS MAGAZINE / NOVEMBER 2009

the world begun to disappear as aconsequence o the global war on ter-ror, which in many ways has becomea globalized version o those earlier,regional ailures o democracy.

Many individual cases are wellknown. Binyam Mohamed, an alleged

conspirator in Jose Padillas now de-bunked dirty bomb plot, was arrestedin Karachi in 2002 and own by theCIA to Morocco, where he was tor-tured or eighteen months. He eventu-ally emerged into the non-covert prisonsystem, as a detainee at Guantnamo,and was released earlier this year with-out charge. Maher Arar, a Canadiancitizen, was arrested at New York Citys

John F. Kennedy Airport in 2002 whileon his way home rom a vacation, ownby the CIA to a Syrian prison, held in

a cofn-size cell or nearly a year, andthen released, also without charges.Saud Memon, a Pakistani businessmanrumored to own the plot o land wherethe Wall Street Journal reporter DanielPearl was murdered, was arrested in2003, held by the United States at anunknown location until 2006, thenreleased to Pakistan, where in April2007 he fnally emerged, badly beatenand weighing just eighty pounds, onthe doorstep o his Karachi home. Hedied a ew weeks later.

The total number o men andwomen who have been kidnappedand imprisoned or U.S. intelligence-gathering purposes is diicult todetermine. Apart rom Iraq and A-ghanistan, the main theaters ocombat, Pakistan is our primarysource o publicly known detaineesresearchers at Seton Hall Universityestimated in 2006 that two thirds othe prisoners at Guantnamo werearrested in Pakistan or by Pakistaniauthoritiesand so it is reasonable to

assume that the country is also amajor supplier o ghost detainees. Hu-man Rights Watch has tracked en-orced disappearances in Pakistansince beore 2001. The groups coun-terterrorism director, Joanne Mariner,told me that the number o missingpersons in the country grew to aood as U.S. counterterrorism opera-tions peaked between 2002 and 2004.In that same three-year period, U.S.aid to Pakistan totaled $4.7 billion, uprom $9.1 million in the three years

prior to the U.S. invasion o Aghani-

stan. Correlation does not prove cau-sation, o course, but Pakistans ormerpresident, Pervez Musharra, did claimin his 2006 memoir, In the Line of Fire,that his country had delivered 369 AlQaeda suspects to the United Statesor millions o dollars in bounties (a

boast he neatly elides in the Urdu edi-tion). It is reasonable to suspect thisfgure is on the low side.

One reason estimates are so incon-clusive, o course, is that the businesso disappearance is inherently ambigu-ous. Missing-person reports iled inPakistan rarely claim that the detainedindividual was picked up by the CIAor the FBI. Instead, the detainee isalmost always arrested by city policeor civilian clothed men or unidenti-ied secret agency personnel who

arrive in unmarked vehicles. Thesecretary-general o the PakistaniNGO Human Rights Commission, IbnAbdur Rehman, described the process.A man is picked up at his house,brought to the police station, he said.The amily comes with him and aretold, Hell be released in an hour, gohome. They come back in an hour andare told, Sorry, hes been handed oto the intelligence people and taken toIslamabad. Ater that, the individualis never heard rom again. When the

amily tries to ile a missing-personreport, the police wont take it, and noone admits to having custody o theperson. Some o the disappeared passdirectly to U.S. custody and reappearmonths or years later at Guantnamoor Bagram air base. Others remaincaptives o Pakistans multiple intelli-gence agencies or are shipped to placeslike Uzbekistan, whose torture policiesare well known. Others simply vanish,their ate revealed only by clerical er-rors, or when they turn up dead.

Most o the arrests and detentionstake place under the auspices o Pak-istans Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI),which the CIA helped expand in the1980s largely in order to wage a proxywar against Soviet orces in Aghani-stan (where the ISI continues to wieldconsiderable inuence). The agencyhas evolved into a powerul institutionwith its own agendas and alliancesithas long pursued ethnic separatists inthe Baluchistan region, or instance,where the Human Rights Commission

estimates that at least 600 individuals

have disappearedand the result isthat the CIA itsel oten has littleknowledge o the provenance or pur-pose o a given arrest.

Such may be the case with Sid-diqui. To my knowledge, the onlycurrent or ormer U.S. oicial to

comment publicly on the signifcanceo her capture was John Kiriakou, aretired CIA ofcer who gained noto-riety in 2007 when he told ABC

News that the CIA waterboarding oAbu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda lieuten-ant, produced lie-saving intelligencein less than a minute. Although Jus-tice Department memos later re-vealed that Zubaydah was water-boarded eighty-three times, Kiriakouscomments did much to oster accep-tance o the practice among the

American publicand his descrip-tion o Siddiqui seemed calibrated toachieve a similar eect. In 2008 hetold ABC News, which had hiredhim as a consultant ater his water-boarding interview, I dont thinkweve captured anybody as importantand as well connected as she since2003. We knew that she had beenplanning, or at least involved in theplanning o, a wide variety o dier-ent operations. When I calledKiriakou to ask him about those op-

erations, though, he said the extento his knowledge was that Siddiquisname had popped up an awul lotwhile he was in Pakistan searchingor Zubaydah in 2002, and that theFBI talked about her so oten that Ithought she must be a big fsh. Aterhe let Pakistan, he orgot all aboutSiddiqui until ABC called or an in-terview. I actually had to Google

as to remember who shewas, he said.

Last spring, in the hope that Imight discover how Siddiqui became

such a sought-ater commodity, I tookthe eighteen-hour light rom NewYork to Karachi. Pakistans cities arelike many in the Third World: over-whelmed with humanity, underservedby government, and ruled by awealthy elite who cultivate an atmo-sphere o lawless entitlement. Thecurrent president, Asi Ali Zardari,widower o slain ormer Prime Minis-ter Benazir Bhutto, was once charged

with (though not tried or) attempt-


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ing to extort a Pakistani businessmanby strapping a remote-controlledbomb to the mans leg. My host inKarachi, a riend o a riend, was acharming ashion designer and gunafcionado who also happened to be abona-fde eudal lord. The day ater

my arrival, as one o his servants mas-saged his neck, he explained to methat he could have the subjects onhis lands killed, though I had the im-pression that he would consider suchan act gauche.

Siddiquis own amily is well knownin Karachi. They are religiously con-servative, but also, in certain respects,Western. Siddiquis ather, who diedin 2002, was a doctor educated inEngland. Her brother is an architectin Houston; her sister, now one o

Pakistans premier neurologists, re-ceived her training at Harvard. Sid-diqui hersel attended MIT as an un-dergraduate, and earned her doctoratein neuroscience at Brandeis. Her edu-cation, and the privilege it implies, ispart o what made her disappearanceso newsworthy. Families like hers areunderstood to have enough connec-tions, or at least enough hired guards,to prevent their members rom beingkidnapped, even by the government.

The national press nonetheless

seems to take or granted that Siddiquiand her children were abducted byPakistani intelligence in 2003, mostlikely at the behest o the UnitedStates. Almost no one I spoke to inKarachi believed she could have re-mained underground and undetectedby the ISI or fve days, let alone fveyears. But there was one importantexception. A ew days beore I arrived,Siddiquis ex-husband, Amjad Khan,told a reporter rom the Pakistani dai-ly News thathe thought she was an

extremist and that o course she hadbeen on the run. This so inuriatedSiddiquis sister, Fowzia, that she latercalled a press conerence o her ownand told reporters Khan was an abusivehusband and ather, and that i anyonewas an extremist it was him.

Khan now lives in Karachi with hisnew wie and their two children, in thewell-appointed home o his ather, aretired businessman. He is thirty-nineyears old, tall and slender, and whenwe met he was wearing the long beard

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lam. He invited me into the drawingroom and signaled a servant to bringcookies and cold glasses o lassi, a yo-gurt drink. Khan came to know Sid-diqui, he said, in 1993. She was an ac-tive supporter o Islamic causes at MIT,and during a visit to Karachi, Khans

mother arranged or her to come totheir home and give a talk on the plighto Bosnian Muslims. Ater the talk,Khans mother, presumably impressed,asked him i he liked what he saw. Hesaid yes, and the parents arranged awedding. The ceremony took placeover the phone while Khan was inKarachi and Siddiqui already back inBoston, but Khan, who had studiedmedicine in Pakistan, soon ollowedher and took a research position atMassachusetts General Hospital.

Khan said he loved Siddiqui in theearly years o their marriage but thatthe relationship was always somewhatvolatile; he casually described an inci-dent in which he threw a baby bottleat Siddiquis ace and she had to go tothe hospital to get stitches. The mar-riage began to unravel, he said, aterthe attacks o September 11, 2001.Siddiqui, shaken by the U.S. reactionto the attacks, ew with the childrento Karachi soon ater, and when Khanjoined them in November, he says,

Siddiquis extreme nature becameapparent. She wanted him to go withher to Aghanistan to serve as a med-ic or the mujahedeen. When he re-used, he said, she became hysterical.She started pounding on my chestwith her fsts. She openly asked or adivorce in ront o my amily. Khansparents urged him to return to Bostonwithout Siddiqui, to complete hisboard exams, which he did. In January2002, he convinced Siddiqui to returnto Boston, where they patched things

up sufciently that Siddiqui becamepregnant with their third child.Then, in June 2002, the couple re-

ceived a visit rom the FBI. The agentssaid they were ollowing up on asuspicious-activity report rom FleetBank in Boston. Why had someone atthe Saudi embassy in Washingtonwired $70,000 to accounts linked totheir address? And why had Khan re-cently purchased night-vision goggles,body armor, and, according to Khan,as many as seventy military manuals,

among them Fugitive, Advanced Fugi-

tive, and How to Make C-4? I askedthe FBI, he said, whether I shouldreturn some o the objectionable books,and the agent replied, No, we are aree country. You are ree to read thesebooks. Khan told me that the night-vision goggles were actually just a

single night-vision scope or his hunt-ing rie; the body armor was a bul-letproo vest or his uncle, a big-gamehunter in Karachi. The $70,000 wasnot or them. It had been sent to aSaudi man who sublet Khans frst Bos-ton apartment in 2001 ater the couplehad moved to another placethemoney was to pay or medical treat-ment or his son. And the militarymanuals, Khan explained, less con-vincingly, were an appeasement git orSiddiqui. By that time I knew the

marriage wasnt going to last, he said.But I had my exams coming up andneeded to keep things neutral.

The arguments continued, however,and in the end it was Khan who, inAugust 2002, fnally demanded a di-vorce. The parting was quite bitter,and perhaps not entirely because oSiddiquis purported radical proclivi-ties. Even beore the divorce was fnal-ized that October, Khan had con-tracted a marriage with his currentwie, an act that Siddiqui, according

to divorce papers her sister gave me,said was done without her consent orprior knowledge. And although Khansaid he oered to pay child supportand sought to see the children, thedivorce papers note that he gave uppermanent custody and would haveno right o any nature with the chil-dren. He has never seen his son, Sule-man, who was born that September.

Khan said he learned that Siddiquiwas missing only when the FBI issuedan alert in March 2003, fve months

ater the divorce was fnalized, seekingboth o them or questioning. He toldme he cleared his own name severalweeks later in a our-hour joint inter-view with the FBI and the ISI, and thathis contacts in the agencies inormedhim that Siddiqui had gone under-ground. He had no idea where his chil-dren were, he saida claim he wouldlater contradict. He said he and hisdriver saw Siddiqui in a taxi in Karachiin 2005. But they did not ollow her.

As we talked, Khans ather came

and sat down and soon began an-

swering questions or his son, whodeerred to him. Eventually the a-ther decided the interview had goneon long enough, and so Khan walkedme outside, where his two youngdaughters rom his second marriagewere playing on the lawn. One was

named Mariam, the same name ashis daughter with Siddiqui. I asked ihe had given up on the possibility othe frst Mariam coming home. Khan

shrugged and said he justliked the name.

Fowzia lives in Gulshan-e-Iqbal, analuent enclave o palm trees andhigh-walled compounds not ar romAmjad Khans home. When I called,she was about to hold her press coner-ence and told me to come right over.

I got a video o the prison stripsearch, she said. Its really gruesome.I knew Siddiqui had been searched

when she let her holding cell or pre-liminary hearings. She was still recov-ering rom her gunshot wounds andhad ound the process, which includeda cavity search, to be humiliating andextremely painul. I assumed Fowziahad somehow acquired a tape o thesearch. Images o a devout Muslimwoman being stripped in the presenceo Western prison guards would be

oensive and inammatory, and thusnewsworthy, and could help Fowziagain sympathy or her sisters cause.

Several TV satellite trucks wereidling outside the house when I arrived,and in the living room three dozenreporters were watching the video,which Fowzia played on her laptopcomputer. I leaned in to get a betterlook and saw that it was indeed a stripsearch. But the woman was not Sid-diqui. The video, taken rom a U.S.television report on an entirely unre-

lated case, was meant to depict whatFowzias sister might have gonethroughnot an outright deceptionbut a well-timed ploy to shit attentionaway rom the damaging claims o anangry ex-husband.

Ater the reporters let, we satdown to discuss the case in greaterdetail. Fowzia kept steering the con-versation away rom questions abouther sisters culpability and the where-abouts o her niece and nephew. In-stead, she wanted to discuss Khans

perfdy. Hes on a lying spree, she


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said. Let him continue! Fowzia spec-ulated that Khan was inventing talesabout Siddiqui in order to save him-self from prosecution, that he was acriminal who had been turned intoan informant, that he could be trust-ed by no one. I asked her what proof

she had that Khan had been involvedin terrorist activities. She said she hadnone. But he certainly held extremistviews, she said, and as evidence sheproduced a copy of the couples di-vorce agreement and directed me to aproviso that Khan had inserted: Un-der no circumstances would the chil-dren be admitted in any of the schoolswhich render education in Westernstyle or culture.

Fowzias resignation about the miss-ing children puzzled me, as had Khans.

When I asked her about it, she said,Ive coped by assuming the kids aredead. A few years ago, she explained,a Pakistani intelligence agent hadcome to her house and told her thatSuleman, who had been born prema-turely and was sick at the time Aaadisappeared, had died in custody. Iasked her who the agent was, but shesaid he refused to give his name. (AfterI left Pakistan, Khan emailed me to sayhe had received confidential goodnews from the ISI that Mariam and

Suleman were alive and well withFowzia. When I asked if he could tellme more, he wrote back that he pos-sessed a lot of detailed informationabout his children and implied theyhad been with the Siddiqui family allalong, but he refused to provide any ofthat information because I was forbid-den by the agencies/my lawyer to do sofor my own safety. Fowzia says she stillhas not seen the children.)

On my way out of Fowzias house, Ipassed a boy who was watching televi-

sion. It was Siddiquis eldest son, Ah-mad, now twelve years old. After hisarrest at the market in Afghanistan hehad again vanished, and for a monthU.S. authorities denied any knowledgeof his whereabouts. In fact, he hadbeen turned over to an Afghan intel-ligence agency, which held him for sixweeks and nally sent him to Pakistanto live with his aunt. I waved to Ah-mad. He said hello and then went backto the Bollywood lm he was watch-ing. He hasnt talked in great detail

about where he was, Fowzia said. He

tries to figure out what answer youwant him to give and hegives that answer.

What most of us understand ashuman relationships, innitely var-ied and poignant with ambiguity,

criminal investigators understandsimply as a series of associations. Themapping of known associates is anold and powerful investigative tech-nique. But within the context of theglobal war on terror, the techniqueknown variously as social-networkanalysis, link analysis, or contactchaininghas been used less forsolving crimes and more for prevent-ing them. Using large computer ar-rays and the kind of automated dataanalysis that already dominate the

world of global nance, investigatorscobble together every scrap of avail-able information in order to createwhat they hope is a picture not ofa single true past but of an innitevariety of theoretical futures. In sucha system, the universe of possibleassociationsand therefore the uni-verse of possible detaineesalsobecomes unlimited. When the FBIdetained more than a thousand Mus-lim immigrants in 2001, for instance,it provided judges at secret detention

hearings an afdavit explaining thatthe business of counterterrorism in-telligence gathering in the UnitedStates is akin to the construction of amosaic and that evidence that mayseem innocuous at rst glance mightultimately t into a picture that willreveal how the unseen whole oper-ates. The FBI reasoned that even thepossessors of this intelligence mightnot be aware of the signicance ofwhat they knew, and so they could bedetained simply because the agency

was unable to rule out their value.It was precisely such a mosaic, inwhich none of the myriad connectionswere quite intelligible but all were lad-en with vague signicance, that set offalarms at the FBI and CIA in themonths leading up to the moment Sid-diqui disappeared in 2003. In early2002, the FBI became aware of a Unit-ed Nations investigation into Al Qaedanancing that mentioned Siddiqui. Acondential source claimed he hadpersonally met her in Liberia, where

she was on a mission to evaluate dia-

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mond operations or her Al Qaedabosses in Pakistan. Dennis Lormel, anFBI agent who was investigating terror-ism fnancing at the time, told me theagency quickly debunked this specifcclaim. Nonetheless, the notion thatSiddiqui was involved in money laun-

dering had entered the picture.Then, in late December 2002, two

months ater her divorce, Siddiquilew rom Pakistan to the UnitedStates, where she had a job interviewat a hospital in Baltimore. On Decem-ber 30, she made her way to nearbyGaithersburg, Maryland, and openeda post ofce box. She listed as a co-owner o the box a man named MajidKhan, whom she alsely identifed asher husband. According to court re-cords, the FBI began to monitor the

box almost immediately.On March 1, 2003, intelligence

agents in Pakistan arrested KhalidSheikh Mohammed, the alleged op-erational planner o the September 11attacks. U.S. interrogators quickly elic-ited rom him the names o dozens opossible co-conspirators. Among themwas Majid Khan. Mohammed said hehad assigned Khan to deliver a largesum o money to Al Qaeda.

On March 5, the ISI arrested Khan,along with his pregnant wie. Accord-

ing to a statement by Khans ather,U.S. and Pakistani agents, includingFBI agents, interrogated his son or atleast three weeks at a secret detentioncenter in Karachi. What Khan told hiscaptors is not publicly known, but byMarch 18 the FBI was alarmed enoughto issue a bulletin seeking Siddiquiand her ex-husband or questioning.

On March 28, FBI agents in NewYork City detained a twenty-three-year-old man named Uzair Paracha,who had just arrived there rom Paki-

stan to help his ather sell units o abeachront property in Karachi. Hisather also owned an import/exportbusiness in Manhattan, and Parachaworked rom an ofce there. KhalidSheikh Mohammed had planned touse the company, he told investigators,to smuggle explosives into the UnitedStates. Among the irst questionsagents in New York asked Paracha waswhether he knew Majid Khan. He saidhe did. And there was more: he alsohad the key to his post ofce box.

At some point that same month,

Siddiqui disappeared. Her amilywould not, or could not, give me aspecifc date. The last traces o her Iound came rom news accounts. OnMarch 28, the day the FBI detainedParacha, the Pakistani daily Dawnreported that local authorities took

Siddiqui to an undisclosed locationor questioning and that FBI agentswere also allowed to question the lady.Three weeks later, on April 21, a se-nior U.S. law enorcement oicialtold Lisa Myers oNBC Nightly Newsthat Siddiqui was in Pakistani custody.The same source retracted the state-ment the next day without explana-tion. At the time, Myers told me, wethought there was a possibility perhapshed spoken out o turn.

There was one fnal association to

take into account. On April 29, thePakistani authorities arrested Ammaral Baluchi, a computer technician theysuspected was plotting to bomb theU.S. embassy in Pakistan. Baluchi wasthe nephew o Khalid Sheikh Moham-med. The FBI and the CIA suspectedthat he had provided the 9/11 hijackerswith almost a quarter o their fnanc-ing. They had also come to believe, aswas later reported in an undated De-partment o Deense detainee biogra-phy, that Baluchi had married Sid-

diqui shortly beore his detention.The means by which we assemblesuch intelligence have become moresophisticated and also more violent.During his initial month o detention,Mohammed was waterboarded 183times. Khans ather claims that hisson was orced to sign a statementthat he was not even allowed to read,and Khan later attempted suicide,twice, by chewing through an arteryin his arm.

The interrogations yielded a great

deal o data, but it is unclear how use-ul any o that data actually was. Mo-hammed later said, I gave a lot o alseinormation in order to satisy what Ibelieved the interrogators wished tohear. Paracha told many contradic-tory stories, and Baluchi, who hadmaintained his innocence during hisU.S. military tribunal hearing, laterfled a statement saying, in eect, thathe was proud o his involvement in theSeptember 11 attacks.

The roles Siddiqui and Paracha

played in the post-oice-box aair

may have been entirely innocent. Ma-jid Khan said at his own military tribu-nal hearings that his travel documentshad expired while he was in Karachiand he wanted to renew them. Heasked his riend Baluchi to enlist Sid-diqui and Paracha to help maintain the

ruse that he was still in the UnitedStates by establishing a mailing ad-dress. Khan and Baluchi both con-tended at Parachas trial that he wasignorant o their ties to Al Qaeda.

Such intelligence may actually beworse than useless. In a 2006 Harvardstudy o the eicacy o preemptivenational-security practices, JessicaStern and Jonathan Wiener note thattaking action based only on worst-case thinking can introduce unore-seen dangers and costs and propose

that a better approach to managingrisk involves an assessment o the ullportolio o risksthose reduced bythe proposed intervention, as well asthose increased. Rather than under-standing all intelligence as actionable,they write, decision makers shouldcreate mechanisms to ensure thatsensible risk analysis precedes precau-tionary actions. At the moment, nosuch mechanisms appear to exist. Theleader o one FBI conterterrorismsquad recently told the New York

Times that o the 5,500 terrorism-re-lated leads its twenty-one agents hadpursued over the past fve years, just 5percent were credible and not one hadoiled an actual terrorist plot. But the

gathering o intelligencecontinues apace.

As I traveled rom Karachi toLahore to Islamabad, questioningamily members, lawyers, and spies, Iheard every possible story about AafaSiddiqui. She was a well-known ex-

tremist. She was an innocent victim.She was an inormant working or theUnited States or Pakistan or bothsides at once. Most people continuedto believe that she had been arrestedby someone in 2003, but it was prov-ing impossible to determine who ac-tually apprehended her, or who or-dered the arrest, or why. I interviewedan attorney in Lahore who swore hehad seen a cell-phone video o the ar-rest that showed what he believed wasa emale CIA ofcer slapping Siddiqui

across the ace. And as to her where-


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abouts before the arrest, the most per-sistent accountthat she was held bythe U.S. military in Bagram prison inAfghanistanemerged from the tes-timony of two former detainees, oneof whom, Moazzam Begg, was noteven at Bagram during the years Sid-

diqui was missing.One afternoon in Islamabad I met

a recently retired senior Pakistani in-telligence ofcer who had promised, ifI agreed not to name him, to answerall of my questions. We spoke at hishome, a gated mansion in one of thecitys wealthiest precincts. He hadsilver hair and a silver mustache, andhe wore a gold pinky ring tted with alarge green stone. When I called toarrange the interview, he initially saidhe did not know why Siddiqui had

disappeared. But he had since thencontacted a friend at one of Pakistansintelligence agencies, a very goodchap who had been pretty senior inthe hierarchy when Siddiqui disap-peared in 2003. Now, over the custom-ary drinks and cookies, the retiredintelligence officer recounted theirconversation, the upshot of which wasthat Siddiqui had in fact been pickedup by Pakistani intelligence and deliv-ered to the friends, which was short-hand, he said, for the CIA.

You people didnt have the decencyto tell me shed been picked up? hedasked his colleague, referring to thejurisdictional problems that plague in-telligence agencies around the world.No, no, it was very sudden, the col-league replied. The friends, they wereinsisting. My host told me that suchinsistence was irritating and disrespect-ful. It was very difcult, very embar-rassing for us to turn her over to you,he said. The decision was made at thehighest levels. Bush and Musharraf

likely would have known about it. Af-ter two to three days, we passed heralong to the CIA.

By the time our meeting ended, Iwas convinced that I had heard thedenitive account if not of Siddiquisreappearance then at least of herdisappearanceuntil, after a fteen-minute taxi ride later to a less fashion-able neighborhood, I arrived at thehome of Siddiquis elderly maternaluncle, Shams ul Hassan Faruqi, a ge-ologist. As we sat in his home ofce,

surrounded by maps and drawings of

rock strata, Faruqi told an entirelydifferent story. He said Siddiquishowed up at his house unannouncedone evening in January 2008, a timewhen, according to the intelligenceofcer I had just left, she was suppos-edly in the hands of the CIA. Her face

had been altered, Faruqi said, as if shehad undergone plastic surgery, but heknew her by her voice. She said shehad been held by the Pakistanis andthe Americans and was now runningoperations for both of them against AlQaeda. She had slipped away for a fewdays, though, because she wanted himto smuggle her across the border intoAfghanistan so she could seek sanctu-ary with the Taliban, members ofwhich Faruqi had known from hisyears of mineral exploration.

A few days later I heard yet anotheraccount, this one from Ahmed Rashid,a Pakistani reporter who has beenwriting about the Taliban and the ISIfor thirty years. As I interviewed him,we were joined by his three goldenLabradors, who had just been shavedbare to make the heat more tolerablefor them. Rashid told me that he, too,had heard from his sources that thePakistanis had picked up Siddiqui. Butinstead of handing her directly to theCIA, they hung on to her. Its possible

there were some conditions being laidfor her being released which theAmericans didnt want to meet. So weheld her for a long time, he said. Ithink she was used as a bargainingchip for something completely differ-ent which we were pissed off about.

Perhaps the most believable ac-count came from Ali Hasan, seniorSouth Asia researcher for HumanRights Watch, whom I visited at hishome in Lahore. My professionalview, he said, is theyre all lying.

Siddiquis family is lying, the husbandis lying, the Pakistanis are lying, theAmericans are lying, for all I knowthe kids are lying. And becausetheyre all lying the truth is probably

twenty times stranger thanwe all know.

One of the chief conveniences ofoutsourcing is that certain costs areexternalized. Pollution, for instance, isexpensive. Manufacturers that pollutein the United States are required to

bear its cost by paying a ne. If they

REPORT 49


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outsource to a country where the costo the pollution is borne directly bythe people, they make more money.Such a transer is obviously desirablerom the point o view o the manu-acturer, but it oten generates politicalunrest in the host country, or reasons

that are equally obvious. This phe-nomenon applies as well when the ex-ternal cost o manuacturing intelli-gence is paid in reedom. Thegovernments that did the outsourcedwork o U.S. intelligence agencies inprevious dirty warsin Argentinaand Chile, Guatemala and Uruguayeventually were toppled by popularprotest, in large part because the peo-ple became aware that their leadershad profted rom their suering. Paki-stanis today appear no less aware that

this type o transaction is occurring intheir country. Indeed, a recent pollound that the only nation they fndmore threatening than India, whosenuclear missiles point directly at them,is the United States. And they havebegun to hold their leaders account-able or the association.

The rising number o disappear-ances became a decisive political issuein 2007, ater Pakistans SupremeCourt, under its chie justice, ItikharChaudhry, opened hearings on behal

o the missing, demanding that theyappear beore the court. This initiativeturned up the locations o 186 disap-peared persons, many o whom wereound in known Pakistani detentioncenters, including Imran Munir, a Ma-laysian o Pakistani origin who hadbeen missing since 2006. During Mu-nirs hearing, it came to light thatPakistani security agents had contin-ued trying to hide him even ater thecourt demanded his presence.Chaudhrys eorts to locate the disap-

peared were met with considerableresistance rom the government. InMarch 2007, the chie justice himselwas summoned to appear beore Mush-arra, where, with ISI and militarychies present, he was ordered to re-sign. Chaudhry reused, and so Mush-arra charged him with misconductand suspended him rom ofce.

In July 2007, a panel o thirteenjudges reinstated Chaudhry, whoquickly returned to his investigation othe disappeared. This time, he warned,

he would order the heads o the secu-

rity agencies themselves to testiy. Healso summoned Imran Munir onceagain, but beore Munir could appear,Musharra declared a state o emer-gency and put Chaudhry under housearrest. Lawyers around Pakistan, hor-rifed to see the chie justice so a-

grantly humiliated, rose up to demandhis reinstatement. The Lawyers Move-ment, as it came to be known, wassoon embraced by hundreds o thou-sands o Pakistani citizens, whomarched in massive protests, andMusharra, in the end, was the onewho had to resign.

The current president, Asi AliZardari, gained considerable momen-tum in his election campaign bypledging to reinstate Chaudhry. Butonce in ofce, he hesitated to ollow

through on that pledge, likely be-cause he was concerned that thecourt would reopen a series o corrup-tion cases against him. The marchesgrew larger, though, and on March16, 2009, while I happened to be inPakistan, Zardari inally reinstatedChaudhry, along with several othersimilarly deposed justices.

I joined the hundreds o supportersgathered at the chie justices house inIslamabad. Families came with chil-dren, people waved placards that bore

Chaudhrys image, and a marchingband with bagpipes played. Chaudhryhad always maintained that his strug-gle was legal, not political, but thescene had all the markings o a post-campaign victory celebration. I mademy way along the receiving line untilI reached Chaudhry, who was sur-rounded by the leaders o the LawyersMovement. He had been shakinghands or several hours, but I thoughtI would try to ask a question. When Ireached him, I took his hand and

asked him when he planned to take upthe missing-person cases with whichhis name had become synonymous.He paused, as i parsing the politicalconsequences o his answer. I dontknow, he inally said, and giggleduncomortably as his handlers, look-

ing equally uncomortable,hustled me down the line.

It is the shooting, oddly enough,that has generated the most detailedevidence about Siddiquis present cir-

cumstances. Ater the conrontation

in Ghazni, she was choppered by airambulance to the Craig Joint TheaterHospital at Bagram air basethesame base, o course, where she mayor may not once have been a prison-er. Her medical intake record notesthat she was a three on the fteen-

point Glasgow Coma Scale, meaningshe was almost dead. The surgeonsopened her up rom breastbone tobellybutton, searching or bullets.They cut out twenty centimeters oher small intestine. They also gaveher transusions o red blood cellsand resh rozen platelets and dosedher with clotting medication, whichsuggests she had experienced heavyblood loss. FBI agents in room withpatient at all times, the medical re-cord stated. Patient is in our-point

restraints. In the span o just twoweeks she went rom near clinicaldeath to being deemed medicallystable and capable o confnement.The doctor witnessed every detail oher recovery. Details o pertinentmedical indings: Very thin, sallowcoloring, dry cracked lips, and alsoat aect, crying at times.

From that point orward, however,the clarity o medical detail is cloudedby legal concerns. Siddiqui had nolawyer during her two weeks at Ba-

gram or on her ight to the UnitedStates. The day ater she landed, shewas in a Manhattan courtroom, acingcharges o attempted murder. In allow-ing her to be transported to the Unit-ed States without even a consularvisit, her own government, notwith-standing its public pronouncements osupport and calls or repatriation, e-ectively gave her up without a fght.The Pakistani embassy eventuallyhired a team o three attorneys to aug-ment her two existing public deend-

ers, but Siddiqui reused to work withthem. During a prison phone call inJune, she told her brother, I just pro-test against this whole process anddont want to participate.

The only people Siddiqui seemed totrust, strangely, were the FBI agentswho sat by her bedside at Bagram, andwhose presence she repeatedly request-ed in the apparent belie that i onlyshe could speak to them or a momentshe could clear everything up. Accord-ing to notes taken by the agents, she

was voluble during those early days o


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her detention in Afghanistan. She saidshe made some bad decisions in thepast, but mostly did so out of naivety.In contrast to her later statements, sheconrmed that she was married to Am-mar al Baluchi, whom she met whenhis sister rented a room at her mothers

house, and that Baluchi had asked herto help his friend Majid Khan with hisimmigration problem. She admittedhaving possession of chemicals includ-ing sodium cyanide at the time of hercapture, though not for nefarious pur-poses, and she said that she had beenin hiding for the last ve years andaware that various law enforcementagencies had been looking for her. Shehad little to say about her children.She nds it easier to presume themdead, the agents noted. She also vol-

unteered to become a U.S. intelligenceasset in the hope that she could ndthe truth to the inner depths.

It is uncertain what the defensestheory of the case will be when Sid-diqui goes on trial this November. Per-haps, as one of her lawyers told me, shenever even touched the gun. Perhapsshe acted in self-defense. Or perhaps,as another of her lawyers claimed at anearly hearing, shes crazy. In this lastmatter, ambiguity is once again therule. Four prison psychiatrists exam-

ined Siddiqui. Two of them determinedshe was malingering, the faked illnessbeing insanity. A third said she wasdelusional and that her behavior wasdiametrically opposed to everythingwe know about the clinical presenta-tion of malingerers, and the fourthpsychiatrist initially diagnosed her asdepressiveand possibly psychoticbut later switched to the malingeringcamp. Siddiquis own contribution tothe debate came in the form of a ram-bling letter, written last July to All

Americans loyal to the U.S.A., inwhich she proclaimed her innocence,decried the propaganda being spunagainst her by the Zionist-controlledU.S. media, and alleged that she spentyears in a prison controlled by theAmericans, of the kind that controlthe U.S. media. Later that month thecourt ruled that she may have somemental health issues but that she wast enough to stand trial.

Aafia Siddiqui is not presentlycharged with any act of terrorism,

nor is she accused of conspiring with

terrorists or giving comfort to terror-ists. Her trial is unlikely to yield sat-isfactory answers about where shewas, who picked her up and why, oreven who she really is. Maybe shewas working for the United States,or Pakistan, or maybe she was just in

the United States looking for a joband committed a minor bit of immi-gration fraud that catalyzed a violentfarce. One FBI ofcial told U.S. News& World Report in 2003, Theres adistinct possibility she was just a vic-tim. Perhaps Aaa Siddiqui is guiltyof nothing more than poor choice inmen. We simply do not know, and thesystem in which she has found herself

ensures that neither willher captors.

The person who seemed best able

to explain what really happened toSiddiqui, her sister, Fowzia, remainedelusive until my last day in Pakistan.At our rst meeting she had promisedto pull together all sorts of evidenceof her sisters innocence, but by thetime she nally agreed to meet again,my bags were packed and my planejust hours from departure.

She said she avoided me all theseweeks because shed been told by mul-tiple people that I worked for the

CIA. All you want are documents,she said. I just want someone who canlisten. Then she dragged out a familyphoto album and started showing mepictures of her sister with various ani-mals: goats, a camel, the family cat.Aaa loved animals, she said.

Then she opened a more formalbinder. She ipped to a grainy photo-copy of a woman lying on a bed. Thewoman bore a striking resemblance toSiddiqui, only she looked younger andsofter, as if shed been airbrushed; sit-

ting at her bedside was a youngmanFowzia wouldnt say whoandmounted on a wall behind her waswhat appeared to be the seal of theUnited States government. The seal,Fowzia said, proved the picture wastaken in Bagram, but she wouldnt saywhy it proved this, and before I couldinspect the image any further sheipped the page and wouldnt let melook at it again. Id love it if a real in-vestigator would come and devotehimself to the case, she said. You

know, really work on it.

REPORT 51

The gift thatstops giving

ScroogenomicsWhy You Shouldnt Buy Presentsfor the Holidays

Joel Waldfogel

Waldfogel delivers a badlyneeded poke in the eye atholiday-time consumermadness, positing that notonly is compulsory gift givingstressful and expensive, but itseconomically unsound. . . . Thislively, spot-on book may be theone gift that still makes sense tobuy come Black Friday.Publishers Weekly

[A] short but engagingmanifesto on the inefficiency ofthe [gift-giving] tradition. . . .[F]ans ofFreakonomicsand TheEconomic Naturalistmay love it.Library Journal

Cloth $9.95

press.princeton.edu

Documents

How America Makes Its Enemies Disappear