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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lazarus_Long who wrote (8721)	9/20/2003 9:47:02 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793745

Maybe we should go back to the old Western. "Kill em all, and let God sort em out!" :>) September 21, 2003 Wanted: A Short List of 100,000 Terrorists By ERIC LICHTBLAU WASHINGTON — How many terrorists are there in the world? The short answer is that no one knows, but the government is trying to make an estimate by creating a master list of all known and suspected terrorists. The list will be compiled at a "screening center" scheduled to begin operating in the Washington area in December. Federal agencies now maintain about a dozen separate terrorist watch lists, and lawmakers have been pushing the Bush administration for months to combine them. The starting point will be a State Department terrorist list used to evaluate foreigners seeking visas. That roster contains 112,000 names, a fourfold increase since Sept. 11, after which the State Department became determined to flag everyone with a possible terrorist connection, said Daniel B. Smith, the department's liaison to the master list project, which is being coordinated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That may seem like a lot of terrorists. But consider that the number of Al Qaeda supporters who trained in Osama bin Laden's Afghan camps is estimated at anywhere from 15,000 to tens of thousands more. Add to that the number of known and suspected foreign terrorists culled from reports by the Central Intelligence Agency and foreign governments, as well as those Americans the F.B.I. has linked to violent protests on issues like abortion and animal rights, and the universe grows larger. Too large, some say. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued to find out how the government compiles its secret "no fly" lists used to stop people from boarding planes. The group wants to know how people like peace activists from San Francisco or a Wisconsin nun on her way to an antiwar "teach-in" have apparently ended up on watch lists. Officials insist they're not interested in tracking political activists, only those engaged in or supporting terrorism. Still, after the lists are weeded to eliminate duplication, they expect the final, secret, master list to include at least 100,000 people. "We'll certainly have a better sense of who the United States government suspects are terrorists," Mr. Smith said. "Whether or not that represents the entire universe of terrorists, we just don't know." nytimes.com