Security certificates rest on unprovable claims about irrational religious fanatics

Evidence

If the places (Algeria, Peshawar, and the training camps), the associations he had, and his behaviour cannot entirely bear the weight of the case against him, two contentions enter to take up the slack and to seal his fate. The contention is that Harkat is a member of a sleeper cell, assigned to wait until he is called upon. The second is that those with terrorist associations will never renounce their beliefs and will, if freed, immediately re-establish themselves with their former terrorist connections. As we saw with Almrei, both these contentions cannot be proved (and in fact there is evidence to the contrary), but both invoke and rely on the idea of an irrational figure, defined by culture and religion, a man willing to die for his religious beliefs. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 129

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how state security regimes construct the figure of the irrational terrorist as a legal shortcut — echoes similar moves in the moral-panic literature.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the claim that ‘those with terrorist associations will never renounce their beliefs’ is empirically falsifiable — what does the actual evidence on disengagement from extremist groups show?