There are 917,000 terrorists lurking in our midst, poised and ready to attack America! By July, we will have identified over 1 million!
As absurd as that claim seems, it is the very premise of the terrorist watch list compiled and used by the US government to determine who may board a plane -- and soon enough a train.
No one wants to find themselves sitting on an airplane next to Osama Bin Laden. From that vivid image (cited from time to time by security officials) has sprung our gigantic government watch list apparatus, the likes of which we have never seen before. And that apparatus was constructed with the Bush administration's customary ineptitude: create sweeping new systems for targeting a broad swath of the population, and treat the right to due process and the fate of innocent people as an afterthought.
These watch lists are spinning out of control. A September 2007 report by the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported [PDF] that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.
We've created a rolling, odometer-style "Watch List Counter" with a real-time readout showing how many names are on the list at a given moment. As our counter shows, the list as of today (according to the IG's numbers) now stands at more than 917,000 names and is steadily marching toward that one million mark.
If there are a million terrorists in this country, we're in a lot more trouble than we thought. In fact, if there were a million terrorists in this country, our major cities would be likely be in ruins.
This is typical of the Bush administration War on Terror bait-and-switch strategy: sell everyone on a commonsense step for fighting terror (don't let Bin Laden on a jet) and then use the resulting fear to create a massive system that turns millions of law abiding Americans into potential enemies of the state. When the ordinary person thinks of terrorist watch lists he or she envisions a small, limited list containing names like Osama Bin Laden and his closest associates - not something with a million names.
Watch lists are used for a growing range of purposes well beyond airline passenger screening, such as selecting people for scrutiny and interrogation at the nation's borders, and excluding people from the country entirely. And as is entirely predictable, their use is quickly expanding across the public and private sectors. Already, private businesses like car dealers and mortgage companies are checking government watch lists and refusing to do business with those whose names appear to be included on the list.
Examples of what we've already seen happen include:
* Famous people like Sen. Ted Kennedy have been caught up on the lists because someone else with their name is a suspect. Other famous people like Yusuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens) have been caught up on the list because the government thinks they deserve to be on it (but won't say why).
* Uncounted millions of entirely innocent people have been caught up by the airline watch lists. Partly that is because the list affects many people with common names, such as the dozen Robert Johnsons that 60 Minutes brought into their studio, who have all been caught up in no-fly hell. Thousands of Americans have been denied a bank account or credit card by their financial institutions because their names appear on Treasury Department watch lists.
Documents obtained by the ACLU, which reveal some of the bureaucratic complexities behind these lists, make it clear that for an innocent person placed on one of these lists, it can be, for all practical purposes, impossible to escape.
It is fairly clear what we need to do here: impose checks and balances on the government power to place people on watch lists, just as we do in other areas where we give the government power to impinge on people's liberties.
It is quite clear that the Bush administration will only make this problem worse before it leave office.
The next president needs to call his or her Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security into the Oval Office and demand that the watch lists be drastically pared down to the small number of actual terrorist suspects and that Americans have a real and workable right to challenge their mistaken inclusion on a list.
Anything less squanders our limited security resources and is downright un-American.