McDonalds may have served tens or hundreds of billions but now the morons freedom fighters at the Department for Homeland InSecurity can claim an impressive feat, one million people.....placed on the terrorist watch list. Yep, thats right, one million people are out there, trying to cause the United States harm. Vicious criminals like Cat Stevens and (until recently) Nelson Mandela can not cross our borders without us knowing about it and being apprehended. So lets all give a big hand to the efforts of the Bush Administration.
From the ACLU:
"Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon."
Fredrickson and Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program, spoke today along with two victims of the watch list: Jim Robinson, former assistant attorney general for the Civil Division who flies frequently and is often delayed for hours despite possessing a governmental security clearance and Akif Rahman, an American citizen who has been detained and interrogated extensively at the U.S.-Canada border when traveling for business.
"America's new million record watch list is a perfect symbol for what's wrong with this administration's approach to security: it's unfair, out-of-control, a waste of resources, treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought, and is a very real impediment in the lives of millions of travelers in this country," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program. "It must be fixed without delay."
"Putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel of innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources on bureaucratic wheel-spinning," said Steinhardt. "I doubt this thing would even be effective at catching a real terrorist."
For many conservatives, the public's enemy #1, wants to change this. They want such ghastly, anti-American changes like due process, constant updates on the system to take those proven innocent off the list and better criteria when adding people to the list. I know, I know, people with the name "Robert Johnson" are obviously America-hating terrorist, so we should just leave the government alone to continue their wasteful, er, patriotic way of protecting us. Yeah, um, thats the ticket. Damn that ACLU for exercising common sense, why do they hate George Bush so much?
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