If those numbers are at all realistic, we have a problem!
Soon from
Washington Post:
WASHINGTON--The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of alleged international terrorism suspects or people who aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.
The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC)--created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency--contains a far greater number of international terrorist suspects and associated names in a single government database than has previously been disclosed. Because the same person may appear under different name spellings or aliases, the true number of separate individuals is estimated to be more than 200,000, according to NCTC officials.
I wonder if they are considering adding Dick "Dead Eye" Cheney to the list after this weekend?
More from WaPo:
U.S. citizens make up ``only a very, very small fraction'' of that number, said an administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of his agency's policies. ``The vast majority are non-U.S. persons and do not live in the U.S.,'' he added. An NCTC official refused to say how many on the list--put together from reports supplied by the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies--were U.S. citizens.
The NSA is a key provider of information for the NCTC database, although officials refused to say how many names on the list are linked to the agency's controversial domestic eavesdropping effort. Under the program, the NSA has conducted wiretaps on an unknown number of U.S. citizens without warrants.
The government has been trying to streamline what counterterrorism officials say are more than 26 terrorism-related databases compiled by agencies throughout the intelligence and law enforcement communities. Names from the NCTC list are provided to the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), which in turn provides names for watch lists maintained by the Transportation Security Administration and other agencies.
Civil liberties advocates and privacy experts said they were surprised by the size of the NCTC database, and said it further heightens their concerns that such government terrorism lists include the names of large numbers of innocent people. Timothy Sparapani, legislative counsel for privacy rights at the American Civil Liberties Union, called the numbers ``shocking but unfortunately not surprising.''
Looks like this will be a long war with a list like that. And the list of "terrorists" keeps growing, exponentially.
Of course one must figure the list is rather ridiculous and probably contains quite a few innocent people being targeted by the Bush administration.