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November 2009 Issue [Article]

The Intelligence Factory

How America makes its enemies disappear

When I first read the U.S. government’s complaint against Aafia Siddiqui, who is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn detention center on charges of attempting to murder a group of U.S. Army officers and FBI agents in Afghanistan, the case it described was so impossibly convoluted—and yet so absurdly incriminating—that I simply assumed she was innocent. According to the complaint, on the evening of July 17, 2008, several local policemen discovered Siddiqui and a young boy loitering about a public square in Ghazni. She was carrying instructions for creating “weapons involving biological material,” descriptions of U.S. “military assets,” and numerous…

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 is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her last story for Harper’s Magazine, “I.O.U. One Terrorist,” appeared in the August 2005 issue.



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November 2009

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