A million points of blight

By Libby

The ACLU figured out that the Bush administration's terrorist watch list just hit a million names.

"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."

Considering that every database has an failure rate, even if the margin of error was only 1%, that's a whole lot of innocent Americans whose freedom to travel is being wrongly abridged. I suspect it's greater than that. Additionally, a database that large can't possibly be an effective tool in screening out real terrorists but these enormously expensive, needle in a haystack schemes are a hallmark of the approach this White House takes to domestic security.

We need more intelligence and less security theater. Still 189 days to go before we have a prayer to get it.