In addition to the difficulty of establishing Issa's “guilt” in relation to terrorism—his background is murky and Russian reports unreliable—the novel is concerned with the construction of a narrative of guilt by association, favored by Bachmann's hawkish intelligence nemesis Arnie Mohr, who bases it on Issa's known contacts. Untraceable Muslims are automatically treated with suspicion, even when, as in this case, the supposed “evidence” seems not to fit the personality of the accused.

XREF: Connects to broader themes of profiling and presumption of guilt, and how intelligence communities construct suspects from associations rather than evidence.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 332