By Noam Biale, Advocacy Coordinator, ACLU Technology & Liberty Program

We’re Embarrassed Too (For the Bush Administration)

Condi said it beautifully last week when she called the inclusion of Nelson Mandela on the Terrorist Watch List “embarrassing.” We couldn’t have come up with a better descriptor for the Watch List itself, except perhaps “morbidly obese.”

The Watch List, run by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center (which doesn’t seem to do much in the way of screening), is well beyond the 900,000 mark and is fast approaching 1 million names. As venerable newsman and erstwhile Presidential candidate Stephen Colbert editorialized last night, “Hopefully we will soon hit our target number of everyone.”

The size of the list is a good indication that the inclusion of a dangerous peace-monger like Mandela is not just an embarrassing mistake, but is at the heart of what makes the list so bloated. As a recent audit by the Justice Department’s Inspector General showed, the nominations process for putting people on the list is a shambles, leading to indiscriminate and/or bizarre additions like the name Robert Johnson, Sen. Ted Kennedy, and the singer Yusaf Islam, also known as Cat Stevens. Ironically, the wife of Sen. Ted Stevens, Catherine, has also had trouble boarding an airplane because she goes by “Cat,” though she has no known ties to the singer (hard-headed woman, though she may be).

The Watch List also seems to operate by the “Hotel California” check-out policy: you can never leave.  The government claims to have redress procedures in place, but they never seem to work.  Afik Rahman, a US citizen who runs a computer consulting company in the Chicago area, was stopped repeatedly even after the government admitted his was a case of misidentification. Hasan Elahi, an artist and professor at San Jose State University (who was Colbert’s guest last night), was told that since he couldn’t be removed from the Watch List, he should check in with the FBI every once in a while. He did them one better, creating a website where he tracks his own movements for the government’s (and everyone else’s) viewing pleasure. Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 hijackers also remain on the list, despite their somewhat diminished threat to our national security.

Congress is now considering a bill to take the African National Congress off the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, so that Mandela can be removed from the Watch List. While this is an obvious first step, it does not provide even a band-aid solution to the larger problem of the Watch List. It does nothing for the thousands of people with the names Robert Johnson, David Nelson and Gary Smith, all of whom will continue to have trouble flying (if you also happen to be named Nelson Mandela though, you’re in luck).  

Rather, the Watch List continues to grow by 20,000 new names per month, a rate at which we will reach a million names sometime in July. No one believes there are a million terrorists out there; if there were, I’d be writing this from a bomb shelter. So what we have is a list of mostly innocent people, who not only pose no threat to this country, but may be distracting us from the real dangers. “Embarrassing” is an understatement.