Fergie's Tech Blog

The 'Terrorist' Batting Average

James Bovard writes in The Boston Globe:

After the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision limiting military tribunals, Congress is scrambling to pass a law regarding trials for detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Republicans are threatening to paint Democrats as soft on terrorism if they refuse to rubber stamp the Bush administration's existing practices, whereby special rules make it far easier to convict "enemy combatants" in tribunals than in federal courts.

But, before sanctifying the tribunals, Congress should recognize that the federal government has far more strikeouts than hits when it comes to terrorist suspects.

In the six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the US government rounded up 1,200 people as suspected terrorists, or their supporters. All that was necessary for an Arab illegal immigrant to be considered a suspected terrorist was to encounter FBI agents in New York or New Jersey. None of the detainees proved to have links to the attacks.

The federal government has inflated the "No Fly List" to 200,000 names. But the list has nabbed more members of Congress than it has terrorists. US Senator Edward M. Kennedy and US Representative John Lewis have been inconvenienced by it, and anyone named David Nelson is likely to face a major interrogation each time he flies. Federal officials make it very difficult to correct the list, thus tormenting citizens who are guilty of nothing more than having a name resembling a name suspected sometime by some government official.

posted by Fergie @ 7/24/2006 01:21:00 PM