Uncovering the Truth, Part I

Is it possible that there has been a mistake? Is there a possibility that there has been some misunderstanding? Is there a possibility that our government has done something wrong?

This is the story of a fair skinned woman, a mother of three children, born on March 2, 1972. She comes from an upper middle-class family and spent more than 10 years studying at elite universities in the United States. Her father was a surgeon, the mother is a housewife. At one time the family lived abroad in the British city of Manchester, and in Zambia. Her brother is an architect and lives in Houston. Her sister is a neurologist and has worked at one of the best hospitals in Boston. She studied biology on a scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a PhD in neuroscience at Brandeis University, where she was considered an outstanding scientist.

In 1992, as a sophomore at MIT, she received a Carroll L. Wilson Award for her research proposal "Islamization in Pakistan and its Effects on Women". As a junior, she received a $1,200 fellowship through MIT's LINKS program to help clean up Cambridge elementary school playgrounds. During her undergraduate career, she lived in McCormick Hall and worked at the MIT libraries. She graduated from MIT in 1995. In 1996, she wrote an article for the MIT Information Systems newsletter about the File Transfer Protocol and the then-emerging World Wide Web.

In 1999, while living in Boston, she and and her husband founded the nonprofit Institute of Research and Teaching. She went on to graduate study in Neuroscience at Brandeis University, receiving a Ph.D. degree in 2001 for her dissertation, entitled "Separating the Components of Imitation".

She was active with charities and a refugee center to which she raised money for Bosnian orphans.

On March 1, 2003, she sent an an email to her professor, Robert Sekuler, at Brandeis University outside Boston. She was looking for a job. "I would prefer to work in the United States," she wrote, noting that she was having difficulty finding work despite her educational background. A few days later, she disappeared. Early in the morning on the day of her disappearance, she left her parents' house, together with her three children. She took a taxi to the airport to catch a morning flight. She was planning to visit her uncle. Two of her children are reported missing.

The last thing she remembers, she says, was receiving an injection in her arm. She says that when she regained consciousness she was in a prison cell, which she believes was on a military base in Afghanistan, because she heard aircraft taking off and landing. She claims that she was held in solitary confinement for more than five years, and that it was always the same Americans who interrogated her, without masks or uniforms. For days, she says, they would play tape recordings of her children's terrified screams, and she claims that she was forced to write hundreds of pages about the construction of dirty bombs and attacks using viruses.

Her baby was taken away immediately, she says. They showed her a photograph of her seven-year-old, lying in a pool of blood. The only one of her children they occasionally showed her, she says, was Mariam, shown as a vague outline behind a pane of frosted glass.

On April 21, 2003, the NBC ran a story about her arrest on the evening news.

According to Human Rights Commissions, there are at least 52 secret prisons, just in the country of Pakistan, in which thousands of people are believed to have disappeared since the beginning of the war on terrorism.

The CIA denies that its agents had anything to do with her disappearance. Michael Scheuer, a member of a unit that pursued al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden (to which is still at large) from 1996 to 1999, says curtly: "We never arrested or imprisoned a woman. She is a liar."

There were never any weapons on mass destruction. That was a lie. The Bush Administration has stated that they never tortured or wrongfully imprisoned people, to which we have found numerous untruths to this as well.

But if it is true that a woman was tortured and disappeared into a secret dungeon, it would be a first in the post-September 11 world -- and yet another example of the decay of standards in America.

Will the truth ever be uncovered?




Thanks to:
Spiegle International
NY Times
NBC


This, the 209th entry in bloggoland! Thanks for reading and coming back. I always enjoy the comments, emails and the banter!!


(c)Copyright 2008 Doug Boggs