Outgoing American leader Joseph Biden (2021-25) marked the final hours of his presidency with a series of executive pardons that included much of his family and political allies, but failed to pardon a notable Muslim scientist imprisoned under the most dubious circumstances. Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani-American neuroscientist who has spent two decades in American custody in circumstances whose controversy tests the borders of farce, remains in custody in spite of major protest at the circumstances and condition of her imprisonment.

Biden Away till the Eleventh Hour

Having ridden to power four years ago with a sheen of affected virtuosity against the conduct of his rival Donald Trump, Biden’s last months in office proved an increasingly humiliating mess. He had ridden to power promising to uphold the institutions and international norms that Trump had so obviously scorned, yet attracted international outrage at his blatant erosion of these norms to defend an Israeli genocide of Palestinians that he defended to the end. It was not until a public humiliation in a debate with Trump that Biden was forced belatedly to withdraw from a presidential race that was clearly beyond his physical capability, and his much-hyped replacement and deputy Kamala Harris received a historical trouncing in the subsequent election.

Realizing that Trump’s return was imminent, Biden took time in December 2024 to pardon his son Hunter, who had been accused of criminal corruption during the previous election cycle and had pleaded guilty to various misdemeanors. Additionally, in the final hour of his presidency, he expanded the beneficiaries of the pardon to other family members: three siblings and two in-laws. Biden hastened to add that the beneficiaries of his pardon had committed no crime and that he was preemptively defending them from persecution.

He also issued pardons for other prominent targets of Republican ire: his former medical advisor Anthony Fauci and former military commander Mark Milley. Fauci, who ran the state agency against infectious diseases for nearly forty years, became a household name during the outbreak of the coronavirus in 2020. Widely lionized at first for his public appearances early in the pandemic, Fauci attracted mounting criticism from the right as the pandemic wore on and, in particular, over his increasingly evident split with Trump.

Milley has had a similarly politicized record: he had distanced himself from Trump’s hard-charging rhetoric, speculated that Trump wanted to mount a coup, and has accused him since of fascism. This won him the hatred of the right and the approval of liberals. In 2023 alone three glowing biographies were written on the fairly unremarkable general, while the rightwing continues to view him as the personification of American military failures.

Also pardoned was the committee that had been assigned to investigate the 2021 attack on Congress which was seen as hostile to Trump. This included Liz Cheney–daughter of the infamous former Republican vice president Dick Cheney, and a cossetted ally of Biden’s establishmentarian Democrats in recent years–as well as several other senior politicians and police officers who had testified in the case.

With Biden in such a forgiving mood, it was widely hoped that he would pardon the United States’ most internationally famous female prisoner Siddiqui, whose ordeal under American custody was long hushed up and has attracted widespread sympathy with years of tireless advocacy from her sister Fowzia and her lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith, as well as well-known Palestinian-American imam Omar Suleiman and former American captives such as Moazzam Begg. An online petition collected nearly 1.7 million signatures. None of this, however, could move Biden quite as touchingly as shared blood and politics.

The Strange Case of Aafia Siddiqui

Given Biden’s commitment to protecting his family from political persecution, it is strange that he spared no thought for a case as clearly politicized as any: this one not in the realm of American partisan politics but the early years of the United States’ fantastically destructive “War on Terror,” when Washington -led by Dick Cheney, the pointedly sadistic father of Biden’s beneficiary Liz- imposed a dragnet and “guilt by association” on countless Muslims and even countries. The failure of that approach does not seem to have triggered any self-reflection over its implications for such individuals as Siddiqui who were swept up in the dragnet. 

Known as an upstanding Muslim scientist in the United States, the case against Aafia Siddiqui seems to rest largely on circumstances and “guilt by association”. One commonly cited argument is that she was an admirer of the 1980s Palestinian preacher Abdullah Azzam who had encouraged Muslims to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. This standard would, of course, implicate not only countless Muslims but many governments, Muslim and otherwise, who also supported the jihad against the Soviets: American intelligence and a good number of anti-communist American politicians who had funded the resistance to the Soviets for Cold War purposes.

Another accusation is that Siddiqui’s second marriage was with a distant relative of Khalid Shaikh, mastermind of the September 2001 attacks on the United States; again by which flawed associative conviction many others could be swept up, even such governments as Saudi Arabia whose ruling clan is close to the bin-Ladin mercantile clan. Rounding off the case against Siddiqui are criticisms of her personality by an ex-husband whom she divorced before the events in question.

During the spring of 2003 Siddiqui disappeared in Pakistan, with widespread accusations that she had been abducted and transferred to American custody in the neighbouring occupation of Afghanistan. The fact that her relative-by-marriage, Khalid, had been captured to widespread publicity a few days earlier indicates that she might have been swept up in a corresponding dragnet. She is thought to have been kept at the Americans’ Afghan headquarters at Bagram; though the United States has officially denied holding her there, other inmates at the prison confirm that she was held there.

In 2008 Siddiqui somehow escaped and resurfaced in Afghanistan’s Ghazni province, where she was accused of attacking an American soldier and imprisoned again. In early 2010 she was sentenced to an effective life sentence of eighty-six years in prison, to widespread outrage in and beyond Pakistan. Various leaders -including the generally pro-American former Pakistani foreign secretary Riaz Khan and the former American attorney-general Ramsey Clark- criticized the decision as a political one. Clark, who held the attorney general’s role in the 1960s, remarked that “Doctor Aafia Siddiqui was victimized by the international politics being played for power. I haven’t witnessed such bare injustice in my career.”

Skeletons in Whose Closet?

Indeed Siddiqui’s sentence took place against the American “surge” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which involved a backroom struggle between the American government and Pakistani military -the initial parties in her abduction- in which both sought leverage over the other. It is exceedingly likely that her very public sentence, which provoked outrage in Pakistan, was a case of such leverage. Her sentence for having allegedly attacked an American soldier at a foreign base -akin to the farcical imprisonment of the teenaged Canadian citizen Omar Khadr– is an especially stark contrast to the practical impunity with which American agents ran riot in Pakistan, a country with which the United States was not officially at war. A year after Siddiqui’s sentence, American mercenary Raymond Davis killed two Pakistanis and was released under an American fiction that he was a diplomat, again to widespread public outrage.

Contributing to the confusion and politicization of such cases is the role played by supposedly neutral but essential partisan observers. The supposedly neutral reporter Deborah Scroggins for example worked with an American government agency in Afghanistan, and heavily implicated Siddiqui. So did sympathetic reporters such as Carlotta Gall, daughter of a British spy whose criticism of the American war was that it did not more directly target Pakistan. Such observers pathologized the Pakistani reaction to Siddiqui’s arrest and essentially took American accusations at their word regardless of glaring discrepancies.

Since then, the Pakistani establishment has capitulated, in 2022 mounting a constitutional coup in league with controversial former ambassador neoconservative ideologue Husain Haqqani and Biden’s envoy Donald Lu. A cheerleader of the war on terror, Haqqani had in the early 2010s endeared himself to the United States by siding with them in their backroom struggle with the Pakistani military, but has since instead opted to help Washington co-opt the Pakistani military. Regionally the coup’s effect was to instantly ratchet up tensions with Taliban-ruled Afghanistan as Pakistan posed as a frontline state for the United States’ regional isolation of Afghanistan. It is worth noting that many Taliban’s leaders are former American prisoners, who during the 2019-20 talks in Doha also called for Siddiqui’s release. But her ordeal is far too embarrassing to too many actors to let her go so easily.

In denying a very questionably convicted prisoner the same clemency afforded to his family and political allies, Biden simply followed a longstanding pattern stemming both from personal indifference toward Muslim suffering and from the larger patterns of a war on terror of whom Siddiqui is an archetypal victim.

Related:

– Are We At A Turning Point In The Campaign For Dr. Aafia Siddiqui? 

– Protests Gather Steam For The Release Of MIT-educated Neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui