We have an excerpt from a new book published Tuesday about the war on terror,?"Wanted Women: Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui," by?Deborah Scroggins.
"Wanted Women"?tells the story of two extraordinary women catapulted to fame by the war on terror. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is the Somali-born activist and author of the bestselling autobiography "Infidel," whose life was threatened for her criticism of Islam. Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani neuroscientist and mother of three serving an 86-year prison sentence for firing on United States personnel who came to question her in Afghanistan. Siddiqui disappeared in 2003, shortly after the FBI listed her as wanted for questioning about her ties to al-Qaeda. Many Pakistanis believe she was kidnapped and spent the missing years leading up to her capture in 2008 in a secret US or Pakistani prison. But as author Deborah Scroggins describes in this excerpt from her new book, CIA officials say that they were still hunting for Siddiqui during that period.
An excerpt from Chapter 5 of "Wanted Women":
To the outside world, Aafia seemed forgotten. Many wondered by the end of 2005 if she was locked in a secret CIA prison. But the silver-haired former head of the weapons of mass destruction unit at the Counterterrorist Center at the CIA, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, told me after he retired that, far from being under arrest, Aafia remained for him the stuff of nightmares.
Aafia Siddiqui is a Pakistani neuroscientist and mother of three serving an 86-year prison sentence for firing on United States personnel who came to question her in Afghanistan.
Mowatt-Larssen had a special deck of fifty-two playing cards made up. Each carried the face of a suspected terrorist he feared might be planning the next big attack. Aafia was the queen of spades, the only woman in the deck. Mowatt-Larssen wouldn?t have put her at the top of his list of potential mass murderers, but he couldn?t rule her out. She was his wild card.
As an intelligence officer, Mowatt-Larssen tried to put himself in the place of al-Qaeda?s leaders and to think as they would. He believed that they had been close, several times, to obtaining weap?ons that could have caused huge casualties. In 2003, for example, the CIA heard that al-Qaeda had devised a small handheld weapon that could disperse hydrogen cyanide throughout an enclosed area, killing dozens or even hundreds of people. Al-Qaeda called it the mubtakkar, Arabic for ?invention.? Around the time KSM was cap?tured and Aafia went missing, the United States received information that an al-Qaeda cell in Bahrain had been ready to mount a mubtakkar attack on New York City?s subways but that Zawahiri had canceled the plan. Why did he cancel? Mowatt-Larssen feared that al-Qaeda?s number two had pulled back to work on a more spectacular strike.
The group?s biological and chemical weapons expert, an Egyptian named Abu Khabab al-Masri, was still at large.
Mowatt-Larssen believed that if al-Qaeda used Aafia properly, she could be of huge value. His hope was that, whether because she was a woman or because her bossy manner got on the nerves of its male leaders, al-Qaeda wouldn?t be able to exploit her full potential.
It wasn?t Aafia?s prowess as a scientist that worried Mowatt-Larssen the most. The FBI had gone through her records from MIT and Brandeis. She had not taken any notably advanced biology and chemistry courses, and there was no obvious application to jihad in her neuroscience Ph.D. What set her apart in his eyes was her combination of high intelligence (including general scientific know-how), religious zeal, and years of experience in the United States. ?So far they have had very few people who have been able to come to the U.S. and thrive,? he said. ?Aafia is different. She knows about U.S. immigration procedures and visas. She knows how to enroll in American educational institutions. She can open bank accounts and transfer money. She knows how things work here. She could have been very useful to them simply for her understanding of the U.S.?
Mowatt-Larssen and his team had not forgotten the documents found in the Qadoos house at the time of KSM?s arrest. They had shown that Abu Khabab al-Masri, the Egyptian weapons expert, was ready to produce botulinum, salmonella, and cyanide, and was close to producing anthrax. They believed Aafia had a connection both to the Qadoos family and to Amir Aziz, the Lahore orthopedic surgeon who had been accused of helping al-Qaeda obtain anthrax. They also thought she was better equipped than any of them to be creative in using such poisons against the United States. ?She had the imagi?nation to come up with the next 9/11,? Mowatt-Larssen said. ?The question was whether they would listen to her.?
He felt they might take some of her suggestions but might leave her out of the loop when it came to operational planning. He had heard what detainees such as Aafia?s second husband, Ali, had said about her. (Alas, the reports of these interrogations are still deeply secret.) Even with the hardest core of al-Qaeda operatives, she had a reputation for being headstrong. ?I remember thinking at the time, ?She must drive them crazy,?? Mowatt-Larsson told me. But he couldn?t be sure. The CIA had never pinned down her exact role. They just knew that ?she was always in the picture. Connections between her and other people the FBI was looking at surfaced in just about every al-Qaeda investigation with a U.S. angle. She was always on our radar.?
At the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Aafia?s name was prominent on a different list, another former official in the Bush administration told me. This was a list of suspected al-Qaeda terrorists whom the U.S. government had authorized the CIA to ?kill or capture? on sight. Once again, Aafia wasn?t at the top of the list. But she was on it and she stayed there.
Unfortunately from the U.S. point of view, the CIA could not easily operate by itself in Pakistan. Thus, when it came to finding Aafia or anyone else on the list, it usually had to rely on the ISI. And most of the time the ISI gave the Americans nothing. Despite the millions of dollars in rewards that Washington was offering, the ISI seldom, on its own initiative, arrested even foreign al-Qaeda sus?pects, much less Pakistanis.
So the CIA wasn?t surprised that its Pakistani counterparts showed little interest in finding a fellow Pakistani who was also a woman. ?Everyone has patrons and protectors,? Mowatt-Larssen said. And Aafia, as a female and a member of a respected Deobandi family, was even more sheltered than most from the prying of U.S. investigators.
The Americans tried to escape their dependence on Pakistani intelligence by playing from an American strength: technology. The phones and e-mails of Pakistanis suspected of links to people on the target list were tapped by the National Security Agency. Ismat and Fowzia no doubt fell into that suspect category, as did some senior politicians and generals who the United States believed were shield?ing militants. The former official in the Bush administration said that if the Americans happened to overhear the whereabouts of one of their targets, they would go to President Musharraf with the in?formation. They would ask him for permission to capture the person and take ?lethal action? if they failed to capture him.
But Musharraf didn?t always agree. If he didn?t want to go along, he might say, and in some cases he might be telling the truth, that the targeted person was actually an ISI asset whom the Pakistanis were using to infiltrate al-Qaeda. (Later it would be widely rumored that?the ISI used Aafia to gather information on militant circles.) In?that case, the United States refrained from action. In the years before the Americans began using drones to attack suspected mili?tants (and eventually a Navy SEAL team to kill Osama bin Laden) in Pakistan, there was nothing else they could do.
But I have yet to find a source who recalls any such discussion of Aafia. She seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
Journalist Deborah Scroggins is the author of the new book "Wanted Women: Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui."
Excerpt?from?"Wanted Women: Faith, Lies, and the War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui," (c) Deborah Scroggins.? Printed courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Deborah Scroggins'?book "Emma?s War" was translated into ten languages and won the Ridenhour Truth-Telling Prize.
Scroggins has written for The Sunday Times Magazine, The Nation, Vogue, Granta, and many other publications.
She?won two Overseas Press Club awards and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award as a foreign correspondent for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.?
anne mccaffrey amazon promotional code artificial christmas trees bean bag chairs android tablet arthur christmas asus transformer
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.