This fascinating story from ABC News details the capture last month in Afghanistan of Dr. Aafia Siddique (or “Siddiqui”; Ar. عافية صديقي), the only woman ever named by the FBI as a top al-Qaeda operative.

Also significant was the “treasure trove” of information captured along with Siddiqui, including documents related to chemical, biological, and radiological weapons. Siddiqui was also captured with maps of New York City and a list of targets that included the New York subway system, Times Square, and the Statue of Liberty, as well as information on the Plum Island Disease Center, a secure U.S. government research facility. She was also carrying sealed glass jars of “numerous chemical substances.” But most importantly:

When nabbed by a team of Afghanistan National Police officers on July 17th, she also had in her possession a one gigabyte digital media storage device - a thumb drive - whose contents included a large trail of emails that authorities are now poring over, sources said. Those e-mails, a source involved in the investigation said, are between “what she described as ‘units’ and what we would call ‘cells’.”

Born in Pakistan, the 36-year-old Siddiqui is a brilliant neuroscientist who was educated in the U.S., attending M.I.T. as an undergraduate and obtaining her Ph.D from Brandeis University.

“Her education troubled us. We know that she’s extremely bright. She’s radicalized. We knew that she had been planning, or at least involved in the planning, of a wide variety of different operations, whether they involved weapons of mass destruction or research into chemical or biological weapons, whether it was a possible attempt on the life of the President,” said [former CIA officer John] Kiriakou. “We knew that she was involved with a great deal and we had to bring her into custody.”

She has been on the FBI’s most-wanted list since March 2004, when then Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller identified her, along with six other men, as key individuals wanted because of links to al-Qaeda.

Siddiqui was also married to one of the nephews of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad. KSM reportedly mentioned her name as a key al-Qaeda operative after he was captured and interrogated by U.S. officials. A month after KSM’s capture in 2003, Siddiqui told her family she was going to Islamabad to “visit an uncle.” She promptly vanished and wasn’t heard from again until she was captured last month in Afghanistan.

But perhaps the most sensational part of the story is an incident that allegedly occurred after she was taken into U.S. custody in Afghanistan:

[In court, spectators] saw Siddique slumped over in a wheelchair, the result of having been shot twice with a nine millimeter side arm after she allegedly grabbed a US Army Warrant Officer’s M-4 Carbine and opened fire as a team of FBI agents, US Army officers including the Warrant Officer and a Captain, and interpreters prepared to interrogate her on July 18th, the day following her arrest, according the federal complaint.

“The Warrant Officer saw and heard Siddique fire at least two shots as Interpreter 1 tried to wrestle the gun from her. No one was hit. The Warrant Officer heard Siddique exclaim ‘Allah Akbar!’ Another interpreter (Interpreter 2) heard Siddique yell in English ‘Get the f— out of here,’ as she fired the rifle,” the complaint stated.

After being shot, she still had to be wrestled to the floor while shouting in English that she wanted to kill Americans. More details about that incident can be found here.

The official DOJ complaint against Siddiqui can be found here.

In a New York court last weekend, Aafia Siddiqui denied the charges against her, and her family and friends insist she is being “persecuted” by the U.S. government.

But it’s not just her family and friends — Siddiqui has a legion of human-rights and Islamic activists who have rallied to her cause and who insist she is an innocent victim. The ABC News story notes that:

At a federal court hearing in Manhattan on Monday, the number of supporters who showed up required the US Marshals to move the Magistrate’s Court proceeding to a larger courtroom and also open an overflow courtroom where spectators could listen to and watch the proceedings on closed circuit TV.

Many liberal critics of the war on terror had long claimed that the Pakistani government had “disappeared” Siddiqui on orders from the U.S. government, or that she was being held in a secret CIA prison. In fact, there are quite a few other outlandish conspiracy theories circulating about Siddiqui — some of them actually started by al-Qaeda.

This fawning Boston magazine article from 2004 insisted that Siddiqui was “just a normal woman” until her life was ruined when the “FBI called her a terrorist.” The article insinuated that Siddiqui was simply singled out by the FBI because of her “obvious passion” for her Islamic faith. Paragraphs like this one…

Siddiqui ordered Korans and other books to be distributed to prisons and on school campuses. Boxes of them would arrive at Faruuq’s mosque, and he’d wait for her to come pick them up. Though she was a small woman, Siddiqui never asked for help carrying the heavy boxes down the steep flight of stairs.

…give you a pretty good sense of their perspective.

On the other hand:

“She is the most significant capture in five years,” said former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who said she lives up to her reputation as an alleged terrorist ‘Mata Hari.’

“She is a very dangerous person, no doubt about it,” said a senior US counter terrorism official.

“This is a major haul, a major capture for the FBI,” said Kiriakou. “To find someone who has such rich information, computer hard drives, e-mails, that is really a major capture.”