Clive Stafford Smith is the British human rights lawyer who represents Aafia Siddiqui, and whom John Kiriakou introduced to his audience in September 2025 after Stafford Smith had spent that morning at Kiriakou’s house recording an episode of his Deep Focus podcast on the case.[1]
What Kiriakou says about him
“Listen to what an awesome guy he is,” Kiriakou said before listing the reasons. Stafford Smith is “a member of the Order of the British Empire” — an honour given, in Kiriakou’s account, “because of the work that he’s done on human rights.”[2]
The two facts Kiriakou dwells on are financial and statistical. “He has never charged a client a single dollar in all of his life. He just lives on donations.” And: “He’s represented 66 Guantanamo detainees and he’s gotten every one of them released. All 66.”[2]
The Siddiqui case
It is Stafford Smith who supplied Kiriakou with most of what he now says about Siddiqui: the sentence being the longest ever handed down in the United States for an attempted murder in which no weapon was discharged; the photograph showing the bullet holes in the tent canvas weeks before she was caught; and Hamid Karzai’s admission about what became of her children.[3][4][5]
It was Stafford Smith who travelled to Afghanistan, befriended the Taliban government, and had them instruct the deposed Karzai to receive him; who found the two older children and reunited them with Siddiqui’s sister; and who registered the sister’s DNA with the commercial ancestry databases and had the missing infant’s photograph aged by artificial intelligence, in the hope that an eighteen-year-old somewhere will recognise himself.[6][5][7][8]
He is suing the CIA and the FBI knowing he will lose both, on the theory that the publicity is the remedy.[8]
The letters
Stafford Smith told Kiriakou that Siddiqui, held in solitary confinement since 2008, still responds to letters, and that he will deliver them to her. Kiriakou passed on the address on air.[9][2][10]
His assessment of her prospects is the bleak one Kiriakou repeats without softening: “her only hope is that President Trump commutes her sentence and lets her go home to Pakistan.”[10]