Merely knowing other Arab men with similar histories sealed a man’s fate

Evidence

Not the cream of the crop of recruits, and possibly not even recruited by Al Qaeda, Almrei has the profile of someone of possible use to Al Qaeda, and that seals his fate. Almrei’s profile is that of an Arab man who went to Afghanistan as a teenager to fight the Soviets in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When combined with the fact that he seems to know other Arab men, some of whom have similar histories, the profile is enough for CSIS, and ultimately the court, to believe that he is someone who will engage in terrorism. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 72

Categorization

• BMF: The logic that an individual is condemned for having a ‘profile’ that makes him ‘of use’ to an organization evokes the way the One State in We (Yevgeny Zamyatin) judges by category and function rather than by acts — and more strongly the totalizing suspicion in The Reluctant Fundamentalist where Changez is treated as a terrorist simply because of his demographic.
• DEEPTHINKING: The inversion here is profound: the profile pre-exists the person and makes him guilty; evidence of non-recruitment is brushed aside. This is legal guilt as a function of statistical category, the state judging a probability, not a person.