100 signatures reached
To: Jim McGovern, Ayanna Pressley, Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Stephen Lynch, Bill Keating, Katherine Clark, Lori Trahan, Richard Neal, Jake Auchincloss, Seth Moulton
Demand Congress Investigate Dr. Aafia Siddiqui's Imprisonment
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Petition Text
I'm asking you to take two specific actions in the case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist trained at MIT and Brandeis, now serving an 86-year sentence at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas.
Dr. Siddiqui disappeared from Karachi with her three young children in March 2003. Five years later, in July 2008, she resurfaced in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, accused of seizing a rifle during an interrogation and firing at U.S. personnel. She was shot and seriously wounded in the incident. In 2010 she was convicted of attempted murder and assault, not terrorism, and sentenced to 86 years.
1. Call for and support a formal congressional inquiry into the conditions of Dr. Siddiqui's confinement at FMC Carswell. There are documented allegations that she has been physically and sexually abused, denied medical care, and prevented from practicing her religion. These allegations warrant an independent congressional investigation for oversight on the record. Press the committee with jurisdiction to open one and use your own authority to demand answers from the Bureau of Prisons in the interim.
2. Formally request an accounting of where Dr. Siddiqui was held between March 2003 and July 2008. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan all identified those five years as possible extrajudicial detention. The U.S. government has never explained them, and Congress has the authority to demand that it does on the record.
This case is about whether the government follows its own rules in how it treats the people it holds and whether it will account for what it has done. Amnesty International, which monitored Dr. Siddiqui's 2010 trial, raised serious concerns about the fairness of those proceedings, and the trial left central questions unresolved.
An 86-year sentence, combined with credible allegations of abuse in custody and five years that have never been explained, raises questions that Congress has both the authority and the obligation to examine.
Please tell me whether you will call for this inquiry and by when.
Why is this important?
A government that can hold someone out of sight for years and then treat the questions as closed won't stop at one case. Rights only count when we insist on them in the hard cases, not just the comfortable ones.
Congress acts when constituents make silence cost something. Adding your name takes seconds and enough names turn a question that's easy to bury into one that has to be answered on the record.