By Patrick Martin
The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center acknowledged this week that there are more than 1 million names on its official terrorist watch list, a number that suggests the vast scale of the police-state measures undertaken by the US government on the pretext of waging a "war on terror."
It would be preposterous to suggest that these 1 million people are actually terrorists—in that event, Al Qaeda would have more troops than the US Army. Moreover, since an estimated 50,000 of those named are US residents, most of them citizens, this would mean hundreds of potential car bombers or airplane hijackers live in every major American city.
There is no legal restriction on who can be placed on the watch list, nor is there presently any legal right to have your name removed from the list once it appears. According to a 2007 report by the Government Accountability Office, an individual may be nominated to the list if they are subject to an ongoing counterterrorism investigation, or if the individual is the subject of a preliminary investigation "to determine if they have links to terrorism." The second category potentially includes the entire population of world.
The result has been daily acts of harassment and injustice, as individuals whose names supposedly match those who are alleged terror suspects suffer dire consequences: they can be stopped from boarding an airplane, denied entry into the US at a border, or denied a visa or other government permit.
Among the well-publicized cases, Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa, is on the watch list, as well as Evo Morales, currently president of Bolivia, and the late Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, while he was being held in a US prison in Iraq. Thousands of Americans who share common names with supposed terrorists—Robert Johnson, Gary Smith, John Williams, David Nelson, Jim Robinson—have been stopped from boarding planes or otherwise targeted.
The list includes at least one US senator, Edward Kennedy, and three members of Congress, John Lewis, Loretta Sanchez and Don Young, as well as a former US Attorney and an army sergeant flying home from deployment in Iraq. Particularly sinister are cases like those of James Moore, author of a critical biography of Karl Rove, entitled Bush's Brain, and CNN reporter Drew Griffin, placed on the list in May 2008, shortly after he did a series of investigative reports critical of the Transportation Security Administration.
According to a report Wednesday by USA Today, the FBI claims that 33,000 entries were removed last year in an effort to purge outdated information and remove people cleared in investigations. The agency also argued that the 1 million entries represent "only" 400,000 unique individuals, with the balance consisting of duplications due to misspellings, variant spellings and conflicting demographic information.
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