Terrorist Watchlist Has More Than One Million Names

By William Fisher

Hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified because of the government’s wasteful and inefficient management of the nation’s one million-strong terrorist watchlist, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The organization cited a recent report by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which found that the part of the watchlist maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may contain a 35 percent error rate.

The OIG audit also revealed that large portions of the list are governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records.

The ACLU says the audit “confirms that the nation’s watchlist system is massively broken.”

The audit confirmed estimates that the terror watchlist contains 1.1 million names as of December 2008, and that many of them are out of date.

OIG auditors reviewed 68,669 of those identities and found 24,000 out of date. In a closer inspection of the out of date records, the auditors found a majority of this sample did not belong on a watchlist.

Torture: It Was Never Just “Sleep Deprivation”

What this L.A. Times story demonstrates is the proclivity of the CIA and other government torturing agencies to twist the meaning of words, and stuff into the nomenclature of one "technique" or procedures a veritable cornucopia of different torture methods. In this "enhanced interrogation" version of sleep deprivation, forced sleep deficit was...

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Detainee Was Tortured, a Bush Official Confirms

The top Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo detainees to trial, Susan Crawford, concluded that the U.S. military tortured a Saudi national who allegedly planned to participate in the Sept. 11 attacks. "His (Mohammed al-Qahtani) treatment met the legal definition of torture," said Crawford.

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BBC adds fuel to 9/11conspiracy theories - Telegraph

A BBC programme investigating the conspiracy theories of September 11 is expected to prolong speculation that the attacks were perpetrated by the American government.

The investigation into the "mysterious" collapse of the third tower of the World Trade Centre will re-examine questions which an official inquiry was designed to answer.

The 47-storey tower collapsed seven hours after the Twin Towers and has become the subject of heated speculation and a host of conspiracy theories which suggest it was brought down by a controlled demolition.

The final official report on the World Trade Centre is due to be published this month and official investigators are expected to conclude that fire caused the collapse of the third tower.

Fuelling the conspiracy theorists, however, a BBC investigation points out that this would be the first and only skyscraper in the world to collapse solely due to fire.

A programme called the Conspiracy Files says it is trying to "explore man unanswered questions to find out what really happened, and why some people think there was a sinister plot to destroy the building."

Database: U.S. prewar warnings of Saddam threat

WASHINGTON, Jan 23 (Reuters) - The Bush administration's warnings about prewar Iraq, from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's "mushroom cloud" to Vice President Dick Cheney's statements on weapons of mass destruction, were...

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ABC Leak Tips Off the Terrorists; Al Qaeda's Net Traffic Goes Dark

'Al Qaeda's Internet communications system has suddenly gone dark to American intelligence after the leak of Osama bin Laden's September 11 speech inadvertently disclosed the fact that we had penetrated the enemy's system."

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The Bushes and The Lost King

"The assassination of John F. Kennedy is a lot like the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Both events were dealt with in the same way, by a "select group of bureaucrats with an agenda of lies"... Osama bin Laden and Lee Harvey Oswald have a lot in common: both worked for the CIA."

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