Al Qaeda information op envelops arrested woman terrorist

Washington Post:

U.S. authorities said yesterday that Afghan officials have detained since mid-July an 11-year-old U.S. citizen, the son of a Pakistani woman accused of firing at Afghan and U.S. personnel there.

In a letter to the family of Aafia Siddiqui, a suspected al-Qaeda operative who is in U.S. custody, federal prosecutors said photos and DNA tests strongly suggest that the youngster in Afghan custody is Siddiqui's son, Ahmed. The boy was detained July 18 when Afghan police arrested Siddiqui in what they described as a shootout near a government compound in Ghazni.

Siddiqui and her three children disappeared in Pakistan in 2003, and the case has been a cause celebre there ever since, prompting protests in Siddiqui's home town of Karachi and dozens of editorials in local papers. In the midst of an uproar over the disappearances of Pakistani suspects this summer, Afghan officials said they had captured Siddiqui after she fired on the compound. She is now in a federal prison in New York, charged with attempted murder.

The FBI had spent years seeking information on Siddiqui, a U.S.-educated neuroscientist who officials feared was an al-Qaeda operative with knowledge of biological weapons. During that time, federal prosecutors and FBI officials have told Siddiqui's mother, Ismat, they had no information on the location of Siddiqui or her children, an attorney for the family said yesterday.

The lawyers and Siddiqui family members yesterday questioned the U.S. government's account that Siddiqui had resurfaced five years after disappearing with her three young children in Pakistan and that she escaped Afghan and U.S. agents after she was taken into custody.

Siddiqui's family contended that the young mother and children were imprisoned during at least some of that time at a secret site, possibly by Afghan or Pakistani officials working in concert with the CIA. Her two younger children, who are also U.S. citizens and were 6 months and 5 years old when they disappeared, are still unaccounted for.

"Something is really dirty here. Everything about the government's story smells," said Elizabeth Fink, Siddiqui's attorney, who said her client was psychologically traumatized over an extended period of time. "Whatever happened to this woman is terrible, and it's incumbent on us to find out what it was."

The CIA and the Justice Department denied that the United States had been holding Siddiqui or her children.

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I think the suggestion that the US was holding her is silly. She disappeared because the US was looking for her not because they found her. She was being protected by al Qaeda and the Taliban and she was caught because of their current desperation.

It is possible she may have been caught in Pakistan and not Afghanistan, but the US had no reason to hold her and her children in secret confinement.

Al Qaeda is trying to cover from another embarrassing loss of a big time operative. Running information operations is one of the few resources they still have.