I never want to believe that women are capable of terrorism. It’s something in my brain that says that men are capable of violence, but women are driven to violence only in times of incredible desperation. I work in gender, but as a woman, I too cannot surmount the notion of violence committed by women for any other reason than that they are threatened.
The London Times is offering speculation that that Aafia Siddiqui may be the “Grey Lady” of Bagram Prison, the woman whose screams were heard by fellow prisoners in the notorious prison since 2004.
Aafia Siddiqui, the MIT-educated doctor and scientist was captured in Afghanistan this week carrying plans for explosives and maps of US landmarks. Suddenly she has resurfaced after disappearing in 2003 after a cab ride to visit family in Islamabad. Apparently Siddiqui has been as difficult to locate as Osama bin Laden, or has she? Five years after she disappeared in the Pakistani metropolis where she resided, she is captured in Afghanistan, seemingly in one of the most benign captures of the war.
According to US officials, whose information is notoriously vague in the interest of protecting US interests, she was captured with the above materials on her person and somehow managed to get ahold of an assault rifle during her interrogation and managed to get-off two shots before she was shot in the chest to be subdued. Does anyone else find that odd?
Only a hysterical woman, a woman who has been confined to the brink of madness would react in such a violent manner. She, not unlike the wave of suicide bombers in Iraq, is the product of a desperate situation, a radical hysteria, I hate that word for what it implies about women, but it has some truth in these circumstances, that has driven them to react with fight or flight. In this new age of war, the choice is clear: fight. She got off two shots at US officials and now she’s been shot in the chest. Not the leg or the arm to disable her, but the chest. Are these people for real? What really happened in that room? More of what happened to the infamous Prisoner 650: TORTURE.
This whole episode makes me so angry. I cannot and will not believe that Aafia Siddiqui is guilty of everything that she is accused of doing. A novel idea for this so-called “War on Terror” would be a transparent “War on Terror” where the real perpetrators of the bastardisation of Islam could be brought to justice, certainly not Aafia Siddiqui and, if she isn’t Prisoner 650, not the Grey Lady of Bagram Prison.
