US enemy-combatant classification expanded from named groups to all nearby Muslims.

Evidence

The US government described enemy combatants as members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, a distinction that was quickly extended to whatever Muslims were around, including non-combatants. The fate of an Afghan cab driver named Dilawar, who was arrested and tortured to death at Bagram Air Base in 2002, is documented in Alex Gibney’s film Taxi to the Dark Side (2007). — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 1366

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Powerful corroboration of the reader’s ‘fear without an object’ thesis: a category built on Al Qaeda/Taliban was stretched to cover ‘whatever Muslims were around’ — the monsterized image applied to any body.
• SEED: Article angle: how legal classification categories expand to fit the monster-image — ‘enemy combatant’ as the modern secular version of the demon.

Related

• The enemy-combatant label expanded to cover any nearby Muslims. (similarity 0.96)