U.S. terror watch list balloons to 860,000 names

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government compiled a list of twenty known terrorists: The nineteen hijackers who died in the attacks and the one — later identified as Zacarias Moussaoui — who got away. The list of known and suspected terrorists has grown rapidly since then and today, six years after the 9/11 attacks, it has 860,000 names on it, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). One reason for the rapid growth of the list is it does not contain only terrorists or suspected terrorists. Brian Beutler writes in the American Prospect that the administration called upon every agency of government to provide the names of every person of concern contained in their millions of files. These files included not just potential terrorists, but also deadbeat dads, people wanted by the federal Marshal, and Drug Enforcement Administration suspects, among others. They all found their way to the terrorist watch list, so that by June 2004 the list had swelled to 158,000 names. In May of this year it reached 755,000. Today, five months later, it stands at 860,000.

In a 24 October testimony before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, GAO’s Eileen Larence noted the list is actually growing even faster than it seems. The FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center told GAO it has deleted about 100,000 records from the list, but investigators are adding records to the list at such a furious pace that the addition far outpace deletions — or the rate at these investigators are establishing suspects’ innocence. Larence said it was like taking two steps backward for each step in the right direction.

Beutler writes that, in any event, the list is already multiple times larger than even the most generous estimate of the number of terrorists out there. It is not known how many names on the list are part of government-designated terrorist groups. That is classified. Analaysts, though, have a sense of the size of terrorist groups. Yes, the exact size of some of these groups is hard to determine, but information about them is publicly available. Al-Qaeda is believed to have on the order of 10,000 members. Hamas has several hundred armed militants, out of a total affiliation of around 6,000 people. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Hezbollah “consists of several thousand militants and activists” and the Revolutionary Guard Corps — recently declared by the administration to be a terrorist organization, and the largest of the groups — has about 125,000 members. The IRA, by contrast, has only about 1,000 active members, according to the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, and the Tamil Tigers rival al Qaeda with about 8,000. Not all of the members of these organizations are directly involved in violent operations, and many lack the operational capacity to commit acts of terrorism. Even using the most liberal estimates, these groups total about 200,000 people. Assuming every one of those members is on the list — a truly heroic assumption — it would reflect an accuracy of only 23 percent.