FBI is Confused About Dr. Aafia Siddiqui

aafia-normalWhile a tiny percentage of our Pakistani population is protesting for fair treatment to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, it looks like the US FBI is as confused as we are about the truth regarding her case.

The official FBI page on one of the most wanted women in the world has her picture with the caption “In Custody”, and on the same page it states:

“Aafia Siddiqui’s current whereabouts are unknown.”

The page also says:

“Although the FBI has no information indicating this individual is connected to specific terrorist activities, the FBI would like to locate and question this individual.”

Maybe the FBI’s left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, or maybe their webmasters are too busy working on more important tasks. Either way, some God-fearing media monitor from their government should poke the FBI to change/fix the text before people start getting the wrong impression from this slip.

I found the link to the FBI page from Mind Hacks, a neuroscience blog that I subscribe to, which also has a summary of her area of research. The research topic does not have anything to do with the military application of neuroscience (an area that Uncle Sam seems to be an expert at). The Mind Hacks page also has links to her thesis and research papers, in case anyone is interested.

The Many Faces of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui

I have always been impressed by the mainstream media’s expertise in selecting the perfect image of a person with just the right expression to support what is being said in the text. For example, in his pictures, Musharraf may look proud, happy, confused, tired, sweaty, adamant, dancing, drunk, defeated or victorious, depending on the publication and the affiliation of the publisher (just search google images if you don’t want to take my word on it).

I think the big media guys accomplish this by using high-speed cameras to take a few hundred images per session, and then tagging each image with the expression it conveys before putting them into their image archives. This way, the authors can probably pick up the right image by a simple tag search.

If my theory is correct, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui has four popular images on the internet right now, and they are probably tagged…

“Normal Aafia”

aafia-normal

 

“Muslim Aafia”, “Taliban Aafia”

aafia-muslim

 

“Convict Aafia”, “Guilty Aafia”, “Prisoner Aafia”

aafia-convict

 

and finally “Victim Aafia”, “Latest Aafia”

aafia-current

 

The last picture the least used. In fact, I have only seen on a few Pakistani websites and have yet to see it used by an American publication. Do let me know if there are any more images around and I can add them to this list.