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Monday, August 18, 2003

"War on Terror" "progresses" through arrests
It doesn't really matter who gets arrested:

Over the past nearly two years, approximately 10,000 people, invariably branded as al-Qaeda suspects, have been rounded up all over the world in the name of the "war on terror". The most high profile of these are being held at the US base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
...
Clearly, it is in the interests of the world's intelligence communities to talk up their captures, although some of the descriptions of detainees could have come right out of 1,001 Arabian Nights.

Asia Times Online spoke to a Pakistani field official associated with an intelligence agency who has personally handled the arrest of 10 Arabs in Karachi. "I will tell you the modus operandi. For instance, once the FBI [US Federal Bureau of Investigation] gives us a mobile number we track conversations, during which we learn the whereabouts of the callers. Then eventually we make a raid. That's how we arrested the first alleged al-Qaeda operator in Karachi, whose last name was Alavi. He was arrested from the posh district of Clifton, Karachi. At the time of the raid he was sleeping, and when we arrested him he did not have a weapon."

The officer claims that in most cases the people they were pointed to by the FBI had simply fled from Afghanistan en route to their home countries, but they were arrested and branded as dangerous al-Qaeda operators set on making Pakistan their "playing field for terror".
-- Asia Times