‘A Comedy of Errors’: Why It’s Time to Get Rid of the So-Called Terrorist Watch List

A Post-9/11 Scheme

The Terrorist Watch List began as a project of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, an agency created in 2003. Like many of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 schemes — think Tom Ridge and color-coded terror threat levels — the watch list quickly proved to be problematic and controversial, in no small part because it was shrouded in secrecy. (Simply put, undisclosed names are placed on the list according to undisclosed criteria.)

As the May audit reminds us, unlike existing lists of suspects, the TSC watch list was designed to consolidate the names of suspected domestic terrorists as well as international terrorists, who are added through a multiagency “nomination” process.

The audit reports: “FBI policy requires that all subjects of international terrorism investigations be nominated to the consolidated terrorist watch list. It also requires that any known or suspected domestic terrorist who is the subject of a full investigation be nominated to the watch list.” However, “Under special circumstances, FBI policy also allows for the nomination of known or suspected terrorists for whom the FBI does not have an open terrorism investigation.”

If that sounds pretty broad, it is. “It’s clear that it started as a real sort of cover-your-butt list,” Calabrese explains. Unlike existing (and public) lists targeting people who had some sort of documented proof against them, the TSC list became a catch-all tally of just about anyone who might merit suspicion, for anything, by anyone — just in case they proved to be a terrorist down the line.

“Put it this way: Nobody ever lost their job for putting somebody on a list,” Calabrese says. “So, for example, according to the DOJ, there are some 50,000 names on the TSC list that were just dumped there by the Department of Defense, but no identifying information about why they might be dangerous.”

Indeed, the process of putting people on the terrorist watch list via the U.S. military recalls the notoriously flawed process of sweeping up prisoners to send to Guantanamo after 9/11. According to the DOJ audit, “shortly after the initial United States invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, the FBI decided to deploy special agents to Afghanistan in an effort to collect fingerprints and other identifying information from known or suspected terrorists … these FBI deployments resulted in the collection of thousands of fingerprints of military detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

By one estimate, since then, “approximately 50,000 military detainees” had been nominated to the watch list.

Crucially, the audit found, “the FBI was not reviewing each nomination and that the determination that these individuals as known or suspected terrorists was being made by the DoD using DoD criteria.”
Who are these 50,000 detainees? Did they end up at Guantanamo? Bagram Air Base? Are they actually terrorists?

We cannot know for sure: The full list of names on the TSC watch list remains classified.

Over 1 Million and Counting

Anonymous terrorism suspects aside, several well-publicized reports in the past few years have found serious problems with the terrorist watch list when it comes to the names of ordinary — and not-so ordinary — people.
In 2006, for example, 60 Minutes obtained a copy of the government’s No Fly List, which comprises names culled from the Terrorist Screening Center’s master list.

Among the hardened terrorists it found on the government watch list? Nelson Mandela, Bolivian President Evo Morales, Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis, countless civilians (with the misfortune to be named Gary Smith, John Williams or Robert Johnson), and numerous dead people.

But the “first surprise,” according to a segment that aired in October 2006, “was the sheer size of it.”

In paper form, it is more than 540 pages long. Before 9/11, the government’s list of suspected terrorists banned from air travel totaled just 16 names; today there are 44,000. And that doesn’t include people the government thinks should be pulled aside for additional security screening. There are another 75,000 people on that list.
With Joe Trento of the National Security News Service, 60 Minutes spent months going over the names on the No Fly List. While it is classified as sensitive, even members of Congress have been denied access to it. But that may have less to do with national security than avoiding embarrassment.

Asked what the quality is of the information that the TSA gets from the CIA, the NSA and the FBI, Trento says, “Well, you know about our intelligence before we went to war in Iraq. You know what that was like. Not too good.”

60 Minutes certainly didn’t expect to find the names of 14 of the 19 9/11 hijackers on the list, since they have been dead for five years. 60 Minutes also found a number of high-profile people who aren’t likely to turn up at an airline ticket counter any time soon, like convicted terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui, now serving a life sentence in Colorado, and Saddam Hussein, who, at the time, was on trial for his life in Baghdad.

In 2004, the ACLU sued the Bush administration on behalf of several plaintiffs who had been wrongfully placed on the list, including a college student, an Air Force sergeant, an attorney, and a U.S. citizen from Pakistan who worked for the ACLU. The lawsuit was unsuccessful, however.

Meanwhile, the list has continued to grow. Last summer, the number of names hit 1 million, a figure so staggering the ACLU added a handy Watch List Counter to its Web site. Now, the number is 1.1 million — and counting.