Siddiqui is a 36-year old Pakistani woman who when young was sent to America by her father, along with her two siblings, for education. But in 2003 while she was living in Karachi, Pakistan, with her parents and three children she suddenly disappeared. She was arrested on July 17 of this year on false charges, according to her lawyer, Elaine Whitfield Sharp, who says she has proof that Siddiqui was being held at Bagram Air Base for the past five years.

Sharp also says Siddiqui appears traumatized, is very passive, and is “like a person who has been excessively institutionalized.” I got this information from this NPR article. Eric Alterman has further details and links here. Particularly interesting is the investigation by Tim Bella at ProPublica, Mystery Surrounds Case of Terror Suspect. Here is a 3-minute video, The Case Against Aafia Siddiqui, from Aug 6, 2008, on AlJazeera:
Click here to view the embedded video.
I doubt there is anything like this in the American media.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The above poem, Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley is perhaps appropriate, as Juan points out.

My buddy Juan Cole links to the following piece today: Abuse of workers building U.S. embassy in Iraq is alleged. Here’s his comment on that story:

Allegations are being made that the foreign workers building the massive US embassy in Baghdad have in some cases been Shanghaied (told they were going to Dubai but then taken to Baghdad instead) and, once in Iraq, have been abused. The charges are against the Kuwaiti contractor supplying the workers to the US government. It has been alleged before that forms of corporate slavery have underpinned some of the private contract work done in Iraq.

UPDATE 7/29/2007: Video testimony of medic Rory Mayberry from blog of Juan Cole this morning:
Click here to view the embedded video.

The problem with keeping up a successful blog is that one has to do an entry every day or readers forget to come back to you. I found this out through early experiments at IC, where traffic fell off dramatically if I missed days, even weekends. Most journalists, analysts and academics don’t have time to blog daily, and therefore don’t blog.

This reminds me of my own problem with this blog, not that I’m a journalist, analyst or academic. I’ve started again to make a post every day, after a lapse for a few weeks there, in the hopes I might improve traffic here a little, not necessarily to catch a virus though, LOL.

Getting back to Juan and his new group blog, he’s got a lot of Middle East experts on the new blog with info on Iran and Afghanistan in addition to Iraq and the Isreali-Palestinian crises. Even though “Global Affairs” is in the title, it appears to have its focus on the Middle East. Here’s a good way to get educated but of course it all takes time, time, and more time.