Last week I wrote about Aafia Siddiqui, wondering if she really was Prisoner 650 at the Bagram military base in Afghanistan, as a Pakistani paper had recently reported.  

In a strange twist to an even stranger story, Siddiqui appeared in a New York City court today on charges that she attempted to murder a U.S. Army captain in Afghanistan. During a police station interrogation, she allegedly grabbed an M-4 assault rifle belonging to a U.S. soldier and then tried to shoot the captain. According to the Department of Justice, two FBI agents were also present. 

The MIT-trained biologist arrived in the U.S. on Monday. From The New York Times:

…in interviews Monday and in a criminal complaint made public later Monday, American officials said they had no knowledge of Ms. Siddiqui’s location for the past five years until July 17, when Ms. Siddiqui and a teenage boy were detained in Ghazni, Afghanistan, after local authorities became suspicious of their loitering outside the provincial governor’s compound.

When they searched Ms. Siddiqui’s handbag, the Afghan police found documents describing the creation of explosives as well as excerpts from the “Anarchist’s Arsenal.” She also carried sealed bottles and glass jars filled with liquids and gels.

The day after she was detained, an American team, including two F.B.I. agents, two American soldiers and interpreters, went to the police station to talk to her. 

Gunfire was exchanged. After Siddiqui managed to get a hold of the assault rifle:

The interpreter sitting closest to Ms. Siddiqui lunged at her and pushed the rifle away as she pulled the trigger and shouted, “God is Great.” She fired at least two shots, but no one was hit. The warrant officer returned fire with his 9mm pistol, hitting Ms. Siddiqui at least once in the torso.

Ms. Siddiqui struggled when officers tried to subdue her, shouting in English that she wanted to kill Americans.

According to the Department of Justice, Siddiqui is charged with one count of trying to kill American officers and employees and one count of assaulting them. If convicted, she faces 20-years. No word on whether she will face other terrorism related charges. 

Andrew Cochran has more at The Counterterrorism Blog.  

(AP Photo from this article at BBC News.) 

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According to the BBC, 16 Chinese policemen out for a jog have been attacked and killed by grenade-wielding terrorists disguised as garbage truck drivers.

An additional 16 policemen were injured. This just four days before opening ceremonies for the Summer Olympics in Beijing.

"China has spoken in the past of what it calls a terrorist threat from Muslim militants in Xinjiang, but it has provided little evidence to back up its claims, says the BBC's Daniel Griffiths in Beijing."

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Former detainee Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi wrote poetry while at Guantanamo Bay, making puns out of American legal terms like 'Miranda' while he was held there.

The Kuwaiti national was released in 2005.

In 2006, Al-Ajami's poems were read in a "Guantanamo teach-in" sponsored by Seton Hall Law School. Many U.S. attorneys and civil rights activists participated in the event.

In her piece in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, "From Gitmo to Miranda, With Love," Debra Burlingame writes:  

Marc Falkoff, a former Covington & Burling attorney-turned-law-professor who represents several detainees, read the poems and later published a selection of them in a book ("Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak," Iowa University Press, 2007.) In his introductory remarks to the students, Mr. Falkoff described Al-Ajmi and the other detainee poets as "gentle, thoughtful young men" who, though frustrated and disillusioned, expressed an abiding hope in the future.

"One thing you won't hear is hatred," he [i.e. lawyer Mark Falkoff] said, "and the reason you won't hear it is not because I edited it out, it's because it's not there in the poetry."

The irony — no, the outrage — is not lost on Burlingame, who also tells us how many people Al-Ajmi killed last Easter Sunday, March 23, 2008.

A recent martyrdom video published on a password-protected al Qaeda Web site indicates that Al-Ajmi carried out the March 23 attack on an Iraqi army compound in Mosul.

In that attack, an armored truck loaded with an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pounds of explosives rammed through a fortified gate, overturned vehicles in its path and exploded in the center of the compound. The huge blast ripped the façade off three apartment buildings being used as barracks, killing 13 soldiers from the 2nd Iraqi Army division and seriously wounding 42 others.

So, why did this terrorist get out of Gitmo? Read the whole piece — also reprinted with additional photographs and still video images, here. 

(Photo Credit: Bill Roggio / The Long War Journal — Abdullah Saleh Al-Ajmi killed 13 people in this March 23 truck bombing in Mosul, Iraq—after he was released from U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay)

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According to this article, several former prisoners at the US detention center at Bagram, Afghanistan say Aafia Siddiqui is being held there. Siddiqui is the first and only female sought by the FBI for questioning about Al Qaeda. The FBI considers her "armed and dangerous."

The Pakistani national graduated from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in biology. 

Several former prisoners including British Muslim Moazzam Begg, who was held at Bagram before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and later released, and some Arab detainees tell the story of prisoner number 650, the only woman at Bagram. Their accounts claim that the detained woman cries all the time and appears to have lost her sanity.

"We have only indications on which we can claim that she is no other person but Aafia Siddiqui," retired Squadron leader and head of the Defence of Human Rights organisation Khalid Khawaja told Adnkronos International (AKI).

"She left her home to go to the airport from her Karachi residence," he told AKI. "It appears that she was picked up somewhere going to the airport. I tried to contact her mother but she refused to talk and later she also disappeared."

More from The Daily Times of Pakistan here.  

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I have a piece over at Pajamas Media called Homeland Security Meets The Sopranos: The Transportation Security Administration seems to have taken a page from the mob.

“Revenge is a delicacy best served cold,” the mafia saying goes. Recent events involving the Department of Homeland Security — a CNN reporter watch-listed and a former federal air marshal being threatened with obstruction of justice — are enough to make one ask: has the TSA been watching too much mob TV?

Last spring, shortly after airing a news report that embarrassed the TSA and the Federal Air Marshal Service, CNN’s investigative reporter Drew Griffin was suddenly placed on the TSA’s terrorist watch list. Last week, CNN ran a follow-up piece. Anderson Cooper interviewed Griffin — a reporter who had suddenly moved from telling an important story to being part of it.

The day after the Cooper-Griffin exchange, Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee (D-Texas) formally called for a probe into the TSA’s seemingly vengeful act. Jackson Lee asked DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff the following: “My question is why would Drew Griffin’s name come on the watch list, post-his investigation of TSA?” Jackson Lee said. “What is the basis of this sudden recognition that Drew Griffin is a terrorist? Are we targeting people because of their critique or criticism?”

Find out the answer.  

(Photo: James Gandolfini as Anthony 'Tony' Soprano for HBO.) 

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A 71-year old amputee named Robert Perry, en route to Florida to celebrate his 50th wedding anniversary, gets his pants pulled down by a power hungry TSO. Do we really pay this agency $5+/- billion dollars a year to behave like this? It's time to read Erich Fromm.

"I have power, I have power, I have power!" screamed the female TSO.

These are the humans that TSA is fast-tracking to become air marshals — and carry semi-automatic weapons on airplanes.

Pam Zekman reports for CBS 2 in Chicago:  

In Chicago, people like Robert Perry are subjected to exhaustive security checks. He was patted down, his wheel chair was examined and his hands were swabbed, all in public view in a see-through room at the security checkpoint. Perry, 71, is not alone

"It's humiliation," Perry said.

Perry was also taken to a see-through room by a TSA agent when his artificial knee set off the metal detector.

"He yelled at me to get the belt off. 'I told you to get the belt off.' So I took the belt off. He ran his hands down over and pulled the pants down, they went down around my ankle," Perry said.

At that point, Perry was standing in his underwear in public view. He asked to see a supervisor. That made things worse.

"She was yelling 'I have power, I have power, I have power," Perry said. The power to stop him from flying to Florida with his wife that day to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary.

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Here's an interesting still frame from CNN's news story of last week: TSA Launches Witch Hunt Against Federal Air Marshal Whistleblowers.

This is the air marshal, in shadow, who authored an email encouraging fellow air marshals to talk to CNN about widespread agency corruption.

Embarrassed, the TSA is now spending an unspecified amount of taxpayer dollars to locate this man. CNN found him in "five minutes."

TSA's Chris White wouldn't tell CNN how much money the agency has already spent trying to locate this person, or for how long they will continue to spend resources on this search, but one can imagine how many TSA analysts have been tasked with measuring this guy's head and ear size against that of the agency rank and file. 

If you missed the original Anderson Cooper 360 report last week, The Aviation Intelligencer has it up here. 

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Sniffix: the $6,000 per-unit bomb detection device that turns out to work on "the same principles as a Ouija board." You have to admit, even the name sounds suspicious.

Michael Grabell reports for ProPublic.com. 

According to the company, Sniffex could detect explosives up to a football field away by reading the "interference between the magnetic field of the earth, the explosive, the device itself and the human body."
 
Critics called it a sham. Yet one unit in the U.S. military bought the device — eight for about $6,000 each — even though the military’s own tests (PDF) said the Sniffex performed no better than random chance. (The testers concluded that the Sniffex operates according to the same principles as a Ouija board.)

Grabell reports that on Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Sniffex with being "little more than the front for a $32 million stock fraud scheme that enriched insiders at the expense of unsuspecting investors."

(photo credit: Homeland Safety International) 

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