when I met Aria um and I started learning about her case really is the one that shocks me more than anything else she's the only person we have a detailed history of who was put through the whole rendition to torture program by the Americans who was a [Music] woman in the wake of the September 11 attacks in 2001 the US president at the time George W bush launched what he called the global war on terror in the process Bush authorized new policies and programs to hunt down and punish those who the Americans accused of being responsible that included the CIA transferring suspects to Black sites around the world and to the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay Cuba many people were held without charge without evidence and subjected to what became known as enhanced interrogation techniques taking Center Stage today is Clive Stafford Smith a civil rights lawyer and Council for multiple Guantanamo prisoners His Highest profile case and most notorious is that of AIA sadiki AIA sadiki was once one of the FBI's Most Wanted suspects today serving an 86-year prison sentence in Texas her story is intrinsically linked to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks but more than 20 years later Aria's ordeal is far from Over Our Guest Clive Stafford Smith shares the details of her case and explains why he believes her story is an example of some of the shadiest dealings and shocking methods that the Americans used to find and prosecute someone perceived as An Enemy of the State cly Stafford Smith thank you for joining us on Center Stage that's great to be here in January 2023 you took on the case of Aria sadiki a 52y old woman serving an 86-year prison sentence in Fort Worth Texas for attempted murder tell me why you decided to represent her well I was in Pakistan actually and I just got three of my pakistanis out of Guantanamo and um aia's older sister FIA who if you're ever in trouble you want to have fer as your sister she CED me and said would I go see afia and stupidly I thought oh I just got rid of three of my clients so now I must have time so I went to see AIA in Texas because I was going there on a death penalty case and uh oh boy when you meet her it's very hard to say no you've had a great deal of experience with guantan Bay you have seen many prisoners the traumatizing effect it's had on them what makes Aria's case different from those others you've represented well you're right I mean I've had 87 people I've represented in GMO and various others elsewhere and I will say speaking as an American if you transported me back to 2000 it would never occur to me that I would spend so much of my life talking to people about how America has tortured them but when I met Aria um and I started learning about her case really really it's the one that shocks me more than anything else when she was first abducted and sold for a bounty to the Americans by the pakistanis wasn't just her she had her three children along and the very first thing that happened was apparently they dropped one child on his head the baby month and apparently killed him although no one's ever admitted that and they took the other two kids age three and six took them a thousand kilometers up to Afghanistan uh and did pretty unspeakable things to them too and I think and you don't have to be a parent to realize that that's something that's about as shocking as anything you could do so maybe we set the scene on September 11th 2001 you have the deadliest attack on us soil that came to be known as 9/11 that this event shakes the country to its core it has such an effect on the American psyche and that's important because it sort of explains the series of um and with that events that then unfolded right I mean you probably remember as I remember where you were on 911 everyone remembers I think they were I was in Louisiana and suddenly the whole place was a ghost town and I have to say since I was born and raised in Britain I totally underestimated the impact of 911 on americ at the time or now at the time okay um and so when all of this started happening and they were talking about invading Afghanistan and then Guantanamo and all these things I thought you know this is mad this is a terrible idea and the first thing I was going to do was sue them over it and I could find no one among my liberal defense lawyers during death penalty because that was the magnitude it was aming of what had happened it had totally shapen America up well 5 days later on September 16th 2001 President George W Bush declares The Crusade the war on terror against Al-Qaeda and terrorist groups where is Aria sadiki at this point where is she living and what is she doing Aria was doing just finishing off her PhD so she had done an undergrad degree at MIT uh and then a PhD at brandise and you know this is actually the first place that everything goes wrong for her because everyone has always thought that she was some sort of neuroscientist scientist person who could do all these things she was really an educationalist this is the basic facts of the case that even her her profession and her expertise there is misinformation about this they honestly thought that she was because she went to MIT some sort of physicist who could make a nuclear bomb whereas I've had really interesting chats with her about her PhD thesis and it's about how to teach your children but the terrorism charges were never actually brought against her she's never been charged with anything at MIT when she was studying she who were her friends who were her colleagues she was um you know she was young she was a student she was already you know she's a sincere Muslim she's not the extremist that some people make out but you know she was passionate about certain causes she was passionate for example about how there shouldn't be a genocide against Muslims in Bosnia um but I seem to recall so as President Clinton um and so she was involved in some of those causes but she was most involved in trying to get her education degree so she could be an educationalist because there are allegations that she had ties to al-qaed here and that that uh she might have been involved in fundraising for the group yeah yeah that's total nonsense I mean if anyone has ties to Al-Qaeda as me I represented dozens of them but but um but nothing old statement on September 17th President Bush issued a secret memo that empowers the CIA to to move against groups that might be planning terrorist activities and this bit is maybe relevant to to Aria and many others that you've represented one day later he signs into law the authorization for the use of military force what does that allow the government to do well it's a very good question what it really allows the government to do what unfortunately it let the government do was Institute a whole process of rendition to torture now they call it extraordinary rendition although I really don't know what ordinary rendition is it's called kidnapping in normal language and when I first went to Guantanamo Bay um I thought I was going to have a lot of explaining to do for a lot of people who really were captured on the battle fields of Afghanistan and I got down there and I had a devil of time finding people who had actually ever been on the battlefield of Afghanistan and honestly I couldn't understand it for a long time until I learned about the Bounty program and it turns out that the US was offering a lot of money to people in Pakistan particularly but also Afghanistan to turn in people who supposedly were Fighters and one thing I always like to ask my students is um you know I'm offering you a quarter of a million dollars here to turn one of your colleagues in for being in Torah Bora uh in 2002 are you going to take it I mean I like to think that I wouldn't but hey if my circumstances were different got to pay that mortgage off um I'm afraid that's a huge amount of money to people in certain parts of the world and it it's actually marari president Sheriff who boasts in his book that more than half of the Guantanamo prisoners were literally sold to the US for these bounties um and this and they weren't in Afghanistan you know a lot of the people including someone like Muhammad El gani aged 14 was in Karachi had never been to Afghanistan um but they were turned in for all this money along with a story about how they were Al-Qaeda and thereby Begins the Vicious Cycle right because if I were to say to you maram are you a member of al-Qaeda what are you going to say absolutely not okay now I'm going to slap you I'm afraid yeah are you a member of al-Qaeda well it depends how many times you slap yeah yeah so they were tortured into confessions and the people who are doing that torturing and not doing it because they think you're innocent they're doing it because they think you're lying and when you finally admit you are a member of al-Qaeda they think aha we were right all along and this is what was going on and I think it's a big mistake to think that these are all evil torturers who are trying to take innocent people and put them in prison it's much more dangerous than that they're going to put you in prison and then you've now confessed that you're Al-Qaeda and at that point how are you going to prove you're not why did the Americans accept accept what those stories well because said they had paid good money yeah someone said that Mariam is a member of al-Qaeda I've now got you to admit you are so the Americans have got yeah them to admit yeah but we we thought you were to begin with because some informant told us normally from the Pakistan military I think the intelligence people have been unbelievably naive one of my guys benam Muhammad who some people will be familiar with confessed when he was being abused that he knew how to build a nuclear weapon now the Americans were obsessed with this understandably you know they're really paranoid about Al-Qaeda getting nuclear weapons um but it wasn't until I got in as his lawyer that we were able to get the real story out which was that he had said that you get uranium you put it in a bucket you swing it around your head for 45 minutes that divides uranium 235 from uranium 239 Bob's your uncle that's your weapons great he was tortured into saying this he was tortured into saying that but then this filters back through Chinese Whispers to the White House and John Ashcroft Attorney General of the United States interrupts his visit to Moscow to say we've just solved a nuclear bomb plot it's just shocking but that's one example of literally hundreds of things that I've come across over the last few years we go now from 2001 to 2003 you have 9 11 you have uh various changes that the Bush Administration puts into place in order to prosecute this war on terror you have the invasion of Afghanistan where is Aria now in 2002 Aria was in Boston and she was living with her husband there was an incident where amjad the husband had bought various things on the internet which included night vision goggles now he's Muslim and I speak again as an American when I say and I'm sorry about this I really think it's awful the Prejudice we had against Muslims after 911 was awful the FBI went by amjad and afia's apartment confronted amjad with the stuff he' bought he says oh well I'm a Hunter and uh you know this is why I get him and they took that at face value I'm Amazed by that I'm amazed he wasn't arrested on the spot actually under those circumstances but all of that went into the files that would later get reviewed by you know some intelligence person you know somewhere in Washington and all of this begins to add up to a portrait allegedly of AIA and her husband she has three children at this point she had two at that point she had two at that point so then how does she go from living there to being back in Pakistan she wanted to go back to her family in Karachi amjad hadn't finished his medical degree so he wasn't quite so Keen he wanted to finish it but they went back to Karachi uh and that's where their marriage really fell apart they got into a very bitter divorce she was then pregnant with the third child sulaman who was born in September 2002 she's taking a taxi to Karachi Airport they're going to fly to Islam Abad because she has plans now for her career as they're going to the airport and Aria really blames herself for getting the taxi to take a back route but it's then that these cars surround their car and um what happens is this so there are all these goons pull first the two older kids out there's Ahmed age six maram age three and they put them in another car Ahmed recalls but he was a very traumatized six-year-old he recalls looking out through the back window and seeing sulan the six-month-old on the ground with blood surrounding him thinking that he'd fallen on his head that's actually the only source we have for the fact that sulaman may be dead and we don't know for sure but at the same time apia is dragged out of the car herself and put in another car she's the only person we have a detailed history of who was put through the whole rendition atour program by the Americans who was a woman and I thought originally you know there's going to be a lot of explaining to do about what happened to these people but this is ultimately the reality and these are the figures of the United States government not me there have been 780 prisoners in Guantanamo if you set aside the nine people who sadly died there that's 771 there are only uh 13 of them who haven't been cleared as being effectively innocent so 99.5% of the people in Guantanamo Bay have been released for which you need a finding by the six top intelligence agencies of America that they're no threat to anyone they're not the worst of the worst terrorists in the world these are the American statistics the catastrophe of our intelligence in Guantanamo and I've seen a lot of this over the last 20 years is just unbeliev believably bad Americans were offering as you said huge amounts of money for people and with air I think it was $55,000 reportedly paid to people allied with then Pakistan president mashara to abduct her and turn her over to the Americans but as you've said the thing that distinguishes her case from the others is the children she had three small children with her the children is really something so ahed who I've talked to about this he Now 26 and he's a qualified doctor really delightful young man but deeply traumatized and he recounts how he was taken to a dark room really dirty Place held there for a little bit then he's a US national right because he was born in the US um then he's taken by the US a thousand kilometers from where he was in Karachi to cabal and put in a prison and he's in a prison for the next 5 years you know what are you doing I I just think this is so deranged that America would do that to him then you've got Mariam who was three and she was taken again to a dark room a separate dark room from Ahmed and then she was taken up to cabul where she was forcibly adopted into a family of American white PE Christian people uh Josh and Natalie uh who had to have been in intelligence agents there in Afghanistan and she's held by them in adoption but she's called Fatima and she's held there for seven years they were taken from Pakistan to Afghanistan AIA is imprisoned Ahmed who's five or six years old is put in a juvenile prison he's told his name is Ali and to never speak of any of this again and Mariam becomes Fatima and is adopted by a white American couple living in kble on the apparent theory that you know you're better off being a white Christian American and a Pakistani Muslim of a certain color Mafia now is in prison and well you say that right but the Americans deny it the Americans deny it the Americans deny to this day that Aria was in a secret prison in Afghanistan where was she in ording to the US they have all these different things is all nonsense but they say she was wandering around Pakistan with her children and in fact was living in a place called nazimabad in uh Karachi for 5 years which just a hops given a jump from where her family lives total nonsense so the Americans are making false claims about her there's a version where they're saying she was just wandering around aimlessly and you know but she is during this time in in Bagram well the only reason we know that is because I've been there several times and found a bunch of prisoners who were in baground with them the first one was a guy called Saleem cuch um Saleem came forward because he's been itching to tell someone this for the last 15 years so he told me the whole story about how he was in the isolation place and apia was being held in this little wooden box how did you know it was her well this was obviously my question and I started talking to all sorts of other people who claimed the same thing so first she was Pakistani spoke ear everyone recognized that second what happened was that and I've been to Bagram and I've talked to lots of people who were there at the time that there were no showers and toilets in the iso area and so they had to take this woman from there to the showers they would put a towel over her head but a lot of the time that came off and they will s and so they were really upset about this the male prisoners were upset that uh when this when this woman were that she was there or that they were able to ident that she was there and then what happened is when they got out they saw pictures of her and a whole series of independent people recognized her as the woman they had seen them there's no question she was abducted with the children we have a recording of one of the officers who did it he didn't know he was being recorded at the time but he boasted about everything they did so then for the Americans to be telling the truth they have to have let her go that never happened she's told me what happened to her and she was later then taken to a women's prison a women's place it was some dark side where she was in a room with two Afghan women and you know this is where it gets really really awful um she was raped by the gods they were Afghan Gods uh she describes getting with the other women tying their hands together so when this guard came in the next day they took him down and beat him up um you know more power to her frankly but then she was put in an isolation cell and the abuse got worse while she was in those prisons the US had a one-way gloss and they were you know seemingly abusing children on the other side of the last that she was meant to think were her children the Spanish Inquisition 500 years ago knew that second degree torture was worse than first degree you know you can torture me I'm not happy about it but if you do something to my son in front of me my child you know that's far worse and Aria told me about this she said I had to stop them doing this and in the end the only thing I could think to do was pretend I didn't care um because I thought that was the only way to stop them abusing those children in front of me and what a place to be in to to have that thought going through to your head in part two of this episode civil rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith talks more about the injustices around the imprisonment of his client Aria sadiki and how he says that through sheer luck she barely escaped an attempt on her life this is a very important element is it a discovery you've made recently that could be very important in this case she was going to go to GNE on this bus she was going to be tired as a suicide bomber and she was going to be killed there to watch the conclusion of this episode click on the link in the description