American terror list spells trouble for innocent namesakes

WASHINGTON: A Roman Catholic nun had to learn to bite her tongue because of it. The wife of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens has had problems getting on airplanes because of it. Even retired commercial pilot Captain Robert Campbell, who flew for the US Navy during the Vietnam war, is affected by it.

‘It’ is the US government’s terrorist watch list, which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says has swollen into a catalogue of a million names in the aftermath of the 9/11, 2001 attacks on the US.

The ACLU said it derived that figure from a Justice Department report on the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Centre, which consolidates terrorist watch list information.
The Centre “had over 7,00,000 names in its database as of April 2007 and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month,” according to a report by the Justice Department Inspector General, the rights group said.

“By those numbers, the list now has over one million names on it,” the ACLU said last week.

And that, says the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program director, Barry Steinhardt, is absurd. “If there were a million terrorists threatening the US our streets would be aflame,” he said. “The lowest number they’ll admit to,” he said, referring to the US government, ‘is 20,000.’

“Twenty-thousand terrorists in America poised to strike? This is a bloated list and has to be fixed.”

But Leonard Boyle, director of the Terrorist Screening Centre, said there are not one million names on the list, and argued that it was an effective anti-terror tool. Boyle also denied that thousands of Americans are detained and inconvenienced daily because their names are on the list. Roman Catholic nun, Sister Glenn Anne McPhee, who used to be education secretary at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, was on the list apparently because an Afghan man used McPhee as an alias according to the ACLU.

A flight from London with Cat Stevens on board, the singer who converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam was diverted and forced to land in Maine when US officials became aware that Islam, or Stevens, was on board. The singer, who has no terrorist record under either name, was denied entry to the United States.

Nelson Mandela needed a Congressional order and Sister Glenn Anne got a bishop to ask Karl Rove, then President Bush’s top political adviser, to intercede on her behalf. The real irony of the massive list is that many suspected or known terrorists are not on it.