For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our next guest is Petra Bartosiewicz.
She's an independent journalist who has written for all kinds of things, and I'm looking particularly right now at The Intelligence Factory, how America makes its enemies disappear at Harper's from last November.
And then also her website is PetraBart, so that's pretty easy to spell, PetraBart.com.
And she has been covering for all different websites, all over the interwebs there, the trial of a woman named Aifa Siddiqui.
Very interesting case.
Welcome back to the show, Petra.
How are you doing?
Hey, good.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
So who's Aifa Siddiqui?
Actually, how do you say her name?
Well, you did mangle her name a little bit.
It's Afia Siddiqui, but you're very close.
Oh, I missed the I there.
I'm sorry.
It's Harper's font's fault, not mine.
Well, Afia Siddiqui is a woman who was one of the more wanted women connected with the war on terrorism.
She disappeared in Pakistan in 2003, and she was missing for five years.
And human rights groups believed that she was a ghost detainee, that she was sort of disappeared either by Pakistani intelligence or in sort of concert with U.S. intelligence.
And she was sort of named as a potential al-Qaeda operative, but sort of nothing ever really came of those charges.
But she resurfaced in 2008 in Afghanistan.
And after she was picked up, she was a team of U.S. soldiers, and FBI agents came to interview her.
And when they came to this police station where she was being held, she supposedly picked up an unsecured weapon from one of the soldiers and opened fire on them.
So she was brought to the United States, and she just went on trial for that shooting incident and was convicted earlier this month in that case.
And so she is now facing a life sentence.
Though she was not ever charged with any crimes of terrorism, she will probably be going away for a long time.
Well, now, here's another riddle for the people trying to figure out a rhyme or reason as to who gets a trial and who gets renditioned and what.
I guess she's got both here.
She was held in secret, apparently, for how long?
Well, nobody knows the answer to that question, and there's not been any sort of solid proof that she was ever in secret detention.
But she says that she was secretly detained.
And I reported on this case for a long time, and it seems difficult to imagine that given the level of interest in her when she disappeared, that nobody knew anything about her for five entire years.
She was also the mother of three very young children, and that would have certainly made her more conspicuous.
And also the Pakistani intelligence are very, very good at what they do.
So I find it difficult to believe that she was never in custody, though perhaps she was not in custody the entire time.
But she's not on the list of names of people.
Well, I guess all they released about Bagram was people currently held there, right?
Did she say she was at Bagram or somewhere else, or do you know?
I don't think she's ever definitively said where she was.
I think there's been all sorts of rumors that she was in Bagram or other places, but there's not really been any kind of confirmed report of that.
There was a confirmed report that there was a woman being held at Bagram, and over the course of my reporting I've seen a lot of documentation that women are picked up in Pakistan and children in some cases.
But there's no confirmation where she was or wasn't at that time.
Okay, and then so she was picked up in Afghanistan, right?
She was.
And then brought to New York?
She was, yes.
She was brought to the U.S. to stand trial.
And when this case unfolded in the courtroom, the jurors were told that the reason that she was charged in the U.S. was because she had allegedly opened fire on these U.S. government employees.
I see.
And now I'm sorry because I really have not put aside the time I should have to investigate this story as well as I should have before this interview here, but it does kind of emerge that there's sort of their narrative and ours, so to speak.
Their story of what happened sounds to me like some scene out of a movie or whatever as compared to her story of what happened, which is that she stood up and then somebody shot her, which seems much more realistic.
Well, the whole thing seems like kind of a weird Hollywood script.
It's really hard to know exactly what happened.
I don't think that we heard the full story in this trial, and there was some truth, I'm sure, being spoken, but it's a war zone, and the people who were in that room were soldiers, and they were certainly trained to shoot at anyone that they would perceive to be a threat, and I think they certainly, what I gathered was that it's pretty clear that they perceived her to be a threat.
Why that is, my guess is that she just flat out surprised them.
She was in this, you know, to sort of set the scene of what happened there, is she was in this Afghan police station, and she was being held in this very small room that was divided by a kind of curtain that was sort of like hanging on a string in the middle of the room, and the U.S. team was brought into this room thinking they didn't expect her to be there.
They were looking for her and thought they were going to be able to question her, but they just certainly didn't, I don't think, know that she was behind this curtain, and she was also unsecured.
She wasn't like tied up or anything, and she herself told on the stand that she wanted to escape, and she knew that she was probably going to be handed over to the U.S., and she told the jury that she didn't want to go back to a secret prison, and that's why she tried to escape, and she moved towards this curtain to kind of see if she had a shot at it, and at that point is where the stories kind of divide.
She says that she just simply surprised these soldiers, and one of them had actually put down his automatic rifle, and so they sort of, she was definitely near that rifle.
The soldiers say she grabbed it and shot at them.
She says, I just kind of was there, and I surprised them, and they shot me.
And the case really boiled down to her word against the word of all of these eyewitnesses who were in the room, meaning the soldiers and the FBI agents, because there was actually no forensic evidence.
There were no fingerprints on the gun.
There were no bullet holes from the gun.
There were no shell casings from that rifle that would tie her to the actual shooting.
Well, now, I remember reading in here that the prosecution, because I guess under the Brady ruling, they have to turn over any exculpatory evidence to the defense, and wasn't it the morning of the last day of the trial or something where the prosecutor turned over to the defense, oops, looks like we have some pictures from that morning that say that the bullet holes that we've testified to actually already existed before this incident supposedly occurred?
So that's all I know about that.
So does that not imply that they had attempted at least to present evidence that, look, here's bullet holes in the walls from where she shot this M4 rifle?
Yes, and I think that strategically, if you're the prosecution, you did not want to have to discover that in the middle of the trial.
I don't think that this was some piece of evidence that they were sort of holding to their chest.
What I heard happened is that basically there were these two holes in the wall where a number of the witnesses said, yeah, yeah, when she shot, it went into this corner of the room.
And there happened to be these two holes in that wall, and that became the subject of fierce debate in the trial, like are these the bullet holes from the M4 rifle or are they not?
And the prosecution's witnesses were saying yes, they could be, and the defense was saying no, there's no way they could be.
And apparently after the defense expert said like there's no way that they could be, the prosecutors went back to review this press conference that was taped in the same room where the shooting happened, but like the morning before, the morning of, like the shooting had not happened yet.
And they were looking at that footage, and they saw this wall with the holes there, and they realized like, oh, okay, that actually means there's no way that those were the bullet holes from that shooting incident.
So they did turn it over to the defense, and then, you know, it really undermined the prosecution's physical claims about what happened in that room.
But ultimately it didn't matter because they had these testimony of these eyewitnesses, and Siddiqui herself took the stand, and, you know, the jury believed the six eyewitnesses versus her.
Well, did you?
I mean, it seems plausible, right?
Okay, so here's the scene.
It's like a hospital room with a curtain divider.
The soldiers don't know she's there.
One of them sets his rifle down.
She says she wants to escape.
There's a rifle on the floor.
That's plausible enough.
She picked it up and tried to shoot at these guys, right?
Or did it seem to you like, you know, six people were up there saying different things?
Or what's the story here?
Well, I mean, I can imagine in a shootout like that that people will see different things and focus on different things because I'm sure it's a very chaotic scene.
And it was like this tiny room, and there were like 15 to 20 people in there.
But that said, you know, there were some significant differences in their accounts.
And, you know, I'm someone who wants to believe that everybody is telling the truth, but that's sort of just virtually impossible in this case.
Somebody is lying.
And I think, though, that in this, from what I could tell in the testimony that came out in the trial, the truth is somewhere in the middle probably.
Like, it seems that clear that, you know, she was there, they were there, there was a curtain.
She went towards it.
She tried to basically get out of there.
She surprised them.
That much is pretty much agreed on, even despite the little discrepancies.
The question then is, like, did she have some bad intent, and did she actually reach for this gun?
And even though some of the eyewitnesses gave, like, this very vivid testimony of her, like, wrestling with the gun and that she got some shots off, like, the physical evidence doesn't really support that necessarily.
And they also described in, like, vivid detail that she just fought like crazy after she was shot to the point where she was kicking them and screaming.
And this is after she's been shot in the gut, basically, and is bleeding very severely and is now handcuffed.
So, I mean, I don't know.
It just seems hard to believe that a woman who is really, really small, and they admitted even, like, to punching her in the face at that point.
So you'd think that, I mean, if someone shot me in the stomach, I doubt I would be moving around after that.
Well, and so let me make sure I understand this.
You're saying there were, she's on one side of the curtain, and there's how many people, 15, or how many on the other side?
There were at least, I think at least a dozen, maybe 15.
There's no final number because some of the people in the room were Afghan officials from the Ministry of Interior and some police officers and some counterterrorism officials.
So the final number isn't quite clear, but I think there were at least a dozen, and by some counts as many as 20.
It's a tiny room.
But nobody was hit by her supposed M4 fire.
I know.
This is like the miracle JFK bullet.
Like that scene in Pulp Fiction, right?
But these bullets, if she shot them, hit nobody, hit no wall, apparently, didn't hit the ceiling, didn't break a window.
The prosecution kind of had the theory that perhaps they hit some piece of furniture that was removed later from the room, but I don't know.
That's a hard one to imagine.
Wow.
Well, you know, I don't know.
I'm not really trying to take any side here other than the whole presumed innocent, like in our basic traditions and things like that.
But this really doesn't seem like they have much of a case, and it does sort of seem like, well, at least the best I understand it.
You know, I used to be a big fan of Matlock when I was a kid, if ever I was homesick from school or whatever.
I'm thinking about it like him, like, okay, so closing argument is, so she shot into a room full of people, didn't hit anyone, and now they don't even claim anymore that she even hit the wall.
They think maybe the bullet hole was in something portable that now isn't there anymore.
Give me a break.
This whole story is nonsense.
But she was convicted anyway.
Did her defense team present that argument well?
Did they have a chance to say, now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we've heard a lot about holes in walls throughout this trial, and yet now the prosecution admits that, nope, these holes were already there before this supposedly happened.
How could their case not completely fall apart there?
Well, because they had the eyewitness testimony of, you know, incarcerated soldiers and FBI agents coming in and all raising their right hand and saying that she picked up that gun and shot.
And that's, I mean, you know, it is very powerful to sit in a courtroom and listen to person after person saying that.
And in the closing argument, the prosecutors made a very sort of strong case saying, like, well, you would have to believe that all these people are lying.
I personally think that there is potentially a different story here that doesn't, I mean, I think that, you know, in a sort of combat situation, which this was for sure, I mean, they're in Afghanistan, in a very sort of deep part of Afghanistan, and Ghazni is not, you know, it's not, I think most of Afghanistan is dangerous, but this is a particularly dangerous area.
And, you know, they are trained to shoot when they see someone who is, you know, posing what they perceive to be a threat.
Now, if it turns out later that this person was unarmed and a woman, that doesn't really look very good.
And certainly if one of your soldiers has put down his weapon in the room, that doesn't look very good either.
So, you know, I think that whatever happened to her during the time she was missing, it was an isolated thing.
This incident in this room in this police station was isolated from that.
It was a kind of, I think, somebody messed up.
But they were able to stay on the stand.
You know, she picked up the gun and she tried to shoot us, and that's why she got shot.
And, you know, it's a war zone.
You know, there was not time to put a yellow tape around the scene, and that's why the evidence wasn't secured.
Yes, we didn't find bullet holes.
That doesn't mean that they weren't somewhere else.
Yeah, right, evidence of absence and all that.
Well, it would be pretty hard to mistake whether she pulled the trigger and bullets came out of that thing or not, right?
An M4, that's, you know, some kind of pretty high-powered rifle that I'm pretty sure makes a really loud bang when you fire it and stuff.
So, you know, she either shot it or she didn't.
There couldn't be, you know, just mistaken accounts of that when we're talking about a bunch of people in a room, you know?
No, you would think that there couldn't.
But, you know, there was a chief warrant officer who put down his gun, and it was his gun that was sort of the question of did she shoot or didn't she.
And he came into the courtroom, and he gave testimony.
And at one point he said, you know, the first thing I saw was her, you know, facing me, and she had squared off and looked like she was about to shoot.
And then later in his testimony he said, the first thing I saw when I saw her was she was reaching for the gun, and I decided to let her go for it so that I could, like, pull out my revolver and get her first, sort of like who draws first kind of situation.
I don't know how you explain that away, but there's an inconsistency right in that sort of statement.
So, you know, whatever you're going to make of that.
But not everybody claimed that they saw her shoot.
Some people saw everybody basically once they heard shots fired, they ran.
And they ran out of the room, and then they kind of all came back in.
And by the time they came back in, she'd been shot.
So there were only, like, I think three people that actually said that they saw her holding the weapon, saw her face, her whole body, and saw her holding the weapon and trying to shoot it when it came down to it.
And that was the U.S. soldier's translator.
You know, I guess maybe my problem is my bias.
I'm just so anti-prosecutor that I figure it's not really— if I was on the jury, it wouldn't be about the witnesses.
It would be the prosecution on trial for whether they proved their case or not, beyond a reasonable doubt or not.
It's not really a question of whether a guilty person goes free.
It's a question of whether the prosecution passes their test or whether they fail it.
And it sounds to me here like the 12 jurors were willing to just go along with what was expected of them, which is, I guess, what most groups of 12 Americans will do in any given situation.
Well, that's not necessarily true.
I mean, sometimes juries bring out surprising verdicts all the time.
But I think that one thing that sort of tipped the balance against her was that there was this ruling on the eve of trial to bring in a series of documents that she was supposedly found with in Gosney, which had all sorts of bizarrely incriminating statements, pictures of guns and landmarks in New York City and mention of mass casualty attacks.
And one thing I found sort of troubling in this trial is that we saw excerpts of those documents in the courtroom, and the judge then sort of sealed them up and made them impossible for the public to view in whole.
And so we just sort of saw these decontextualized things.
But they were kind of crazy, you know.
And they certainly didn't seem like the work of some senior operative, but they seemed like very suspicious.
And she was not able on the stand to explain why she had them, and she kept referring to secret prisons and things like that.
But there was never really an opportunity to kind of flesh that out and get any real answers.
And I think the jurors must have been very confused by that, because they certainly weren't aware of any of the suspicions that human rights groups have had about her past.
And the defense for their part, you know, she didn't trust her defense team.
She wasn't really speaking to them.
And they did not want her to take the stand, and she did it anyway against sort of their advice.
And I think that they also didn't have the ammunition to fight these kinds of battles, this battle, because they don't have evidence that she was in the secret prison.
So they weren't able to sort of, you know, develop that.
And they sort of in a way got, they really tried to avoid dealing with the documents, but the documents were there and they colored the entire proceedings.
So I guess when the documents were introduced as evidence, were they introduced by a witness where the defense, you know, chose not to cross-examine?
Or how did that work?
Well, they were found on her in Gosney.
She was initially arrested by the Afghans.
And so the prosecutors brought in a number of people who worked at this forward operating base in Gosney, you know, military people who sort of said, the governor of Gosney brought me these documents, and then I took them to this room where we started to analyze them.
But, you know, the chain of custody that we heard about started once the U.S. already had these documents.
And it all kind of matters, it really matters in this case like what happened to her before she was found in Gosney.
I think that makes all the difference in the world.
If she was someone who was on the run for five years, then that tells you one story.
If she was someone who was actually detained for some period of time and maybe was mentally unstable, that suggests something very different, you know.
And we never really got a chance to figure that out, and I just don't think the defense had that information.
So, you know, they couldn't really bring it out.
And, you know, strategically, I'm not a lawyer, so I can't really sort of say what's the best strategy.
They lost.
So, you know, but who knows if those documents had not been introduced and she had not testified whether it would have had a different outcome.
I just couldn't say.
Yeah.
All right.
Everybody, it's Petra Bartasiewicz.
She's an independent journalist.
She's got articles all over the place.
You can check out her website at PetraBart.com.
And she has a new book.
Is this thing, when is this coming out, The Best Terrorists We Could Find?
I think it's coming out early next year, so it's going to be a little while still.
Yeah, well, they keep coming up with these cases.
And there's so many, I guess, since the last time I interviewed you on that subject, of all the wide and varied sort of bogus cases that the Justice Department had prosecuted through the Bush years, we've had quite a few least questionable situations around the country.
The Denver case and all that, I don't know nearly enough about that.
Have you been covering that, the guy from Denver?
The underwear bomber guy?
No, no, the guy, I'm sorry, I forget his name, but he had family in New York and they made a big deal about it last fall.
I don't know what's happening with that case right now.
It certainly hasn't gone to trial yet, and I'm sure it won't for a while.
I haven't been following that one as closely, but I've sort of been looking at how finally, all these years the focus was on Guantanamo and enemy combatants and these indefinite detentions, and now the debate's sort of finally shifting to the federal courts because they're talking about bringing some of these detainees, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to trial in the U.S.
And so, Afia's case was kind of like a dry run for that, in a sense, but her case is really not so different from so many others that we've seen since 9-11, and these questions about secrecy of some of these documents that are shown that end up being crucial in the case, those are just recurring themes that are not going away, and I'm sure that when the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed venue is finally decided, that's going to be a really big, big issue.
I don't really see any changes happening in this respect.
Well, you know, I saw an interesting footnote just the other day about the Detroit case, where the Justice Department ended up prosecuting the prosecutor who framed up those five guys, and just recently one of them tried to sue him and the court dismissed the case and said all prosecutors have sovereign immunity no matter what they do, even though the Justice Department prosecuted him for what he did, even though they only prosecuted him to try to distance themselves, and they're the ones who made him do it in the first place, and we all know it, but anyway.
Well, prosecutors do, I'm very familiar with that case, but prosecutors, federal prosecutors do have immunity from being prosecuted for misconduct during the trial.
I mean, I think there's obviously exceptions to that, but it just never happens, and in some of the research I've done, I was looking at, I was trying to find precedent for any kind of prosecutors being prosecuted, and I think this guy, the prosecutor in Detroit, was like literally one of the only, if not the only case I could find.
On the state level, there have been, and you know, there have been accusations that are really, really serious against certain prosecutors who are still working.
I mean, these are in different types of cases, and there have been more, there have been analysis done of like state-level kinds of prosecutions where they actually show very serious misconduct.
So there is kind of a question of, you know, being able to hold the prosecution also to a certain standard, because there's plenty of rules for the defense attorneys, especially surrounding these terrorism-related cases, especially in terms of like how they handle evidence and things like that.
Yeah, well, and even their rights to confidentiality and the rest of it.
All right, listen, I know you've got to go.
I really appreciate your coverage of this story and your time on the show today.
It's great stuff.
Hey, thanks very much for having me again.
All right, everybody, that's Petra Bartasiewicz.
Her website is PetraBart.com, and we'll be right back after this.
