The US military classified the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) as a terrorist support entity in 2007 and used association with it as a justification to detain prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, The New York Times said, reports which ISPR Director General General Athar Abbas rejected as lacking credibility. One document given to NYT, says detainees who associated with the ISI Directorate “may have provided support to Al Qaeda or the Taliban, or engaged in hostilities against US or Coalition forces”.
The ISI, along with Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence, are among 32 groups on the list of “associated forces”, which also includes Egypt’s Islamic Jihad. The document defines an “associate force” as “militant forces and organisations with which Al Qaeda, the Al Qaeda network, or the Taliban has an established working, supportive, or beneficiary relationship for the achievement of common goals.” The “JTF-GTMO Matrix of Threat Indicators for Enemy Combatants” likely dates from 2007 according to its classification code, and is part of a trove of 759 files on detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, the US military prison in Cuba.
Meanwhile, in his reaction to the US military classified documents, the ISPR DG refrained from a detailed comment and said, “There is no credible source in the story.” A security official, however, said such allegations against the ISI were not new, adding that the Americans had come up with such statements in the past as well.
