Feel Secure Yet? 750,000 on the Terrorist Watchlist

According to a report in the USAToday, the Terrorist Watch list now contains 755,000 names. Approximately 200,000 names have been added each year since 2004. Obviously this raises a ton of concerns by those interested in civil liberties. The list is quickly headed to a million, and it’s shear size makes it impossible to use it effectively.

“It undermines the authority of the list,” says Lisa Graves of the Center for National Security Studies. “There’s just no rational, reasonable estimate that there’s anywhere close to that many suspected terrorists.”

Now why does Ms. Graves think our government gives a happy damn about that. (Rational, reasonable…not words I associate with the current Administration.) Cheney would prefer that everyone besides his Haliburton and Blackwater friends be put on the list. It’s like these sexual predator registries. Every person that’s ever committed a crime that involved their genitals gets on the list. Get caught peeing in public…get put on the sexual offender registry. If you’re a teenager and you have sex with your teenage girlfriend, off to the sex offender registry.

If I go to the FDLE sex offender website and put in my zip code, something over three hundred hits come back. Now what am I supposed to do to try to protect against that many people. This terror watch list is the same way. This is the classic American penchant for overreaction. It cannot be effective. If there are nearly a million terrorists already in this country, we’re doomed.

Just more idiocy from the Department of Homeland Stupidity.