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September 11, 2008
Posted: 1000 GMT
NOTTINGHAM, England – The ripple effect of 9/11 has extended far and wide and even, seven years on, reached right out and overwhelmed Rizwaan Sabir as he worked away on his laptop. "I felt that I was some big-time nutcase, some terrorist who just planned 9/11 or something, something so bizarre," says Sabir. Sabir is a 23-year-old graduate student born and bred in Nottingham, central England. He attends his hometown university and is researching extremism for his PhD. But back in May, Sabir says, he was arrested on campus and held for six days as police picked through his life and his family home. Eventually he was released without charge. Watch what happened to Sabir. What did Sabir do? His homework. He downloaded a copy of the al Qaeda training manual from The Federation of American Scientists Web site. Its source: the US Department of Justice. And it's a document that is still available to anyone on the Internet. "This is not the way to fight the war on terror, by locking away innocent people," Sabir said. "You are radicalizing more people and you are ostracizing more people and you're breeding discontent and disenchantment. It might just drive them over the edge and before you know it, you've given birth to 1,000 Osama bin Ladens." Sabir was arrested as a result of a tipoff from Nottingham University, where he studied. Neither the university nor British police would comment. All charges were dropped and Sabir continues as a student at the same institution. But it is difficult to separate the legacy of 9/11 and what happened to Sabir. The Bush administration is categorical that there will be casualties of war. And U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has always said vigilance will be important because 9/11 changed the global security landscape forever. "As September 11th recedes into the past, there are some people who've to come to think of it as a kind of singular event and of there being nothing else out there... we are the victims of our own success... that another attack has been prevented." Mukasey said in July. But Sabir points out that al Qaeda is an ideology - not a country, not an army, not a singular enemy that can be bombed into defeat. " I want to quash them as much as anybody," he says, "but by the government and police services arresting people like me, they're not helping anybody apart from the real terrorist and that's the truth and it will bite them again, and again and again" he warns. Sabir says he's much more guarded on the computer now, believing that everything he looks at or downloads could possibly be mistaken as a weapon of war. Posted by: International Security Correspondent, Paula Newton
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