How the Terrorist Screening Center Is Going to Solve
the Unemployment Problem

by Doc Cuddy

Turns out somewhere in Washington there is a building housing something the FBI calls "the Terrorist Screening Center." According to the director as quoted on the center’s home page:
                   (http://www.fbi.gov/terrorinfo/counterrorism/tsc.htm),
"We're here to get information to the people who can stop dangerous types from entering the U.S....and who can identify dangerous types who are already on our streets and arrest them."

OK. Sounds good. Joe Blow Customs Agent at a remote Canada border crossing in uppermost Idaho has somebody wanting in, but for whatever reason Joe isn’t sure about this guy. He makes a quick call to the TSC, gives them the guy’s name, they check their computer and inform Joe the guy is clean.

End of story? Not quite.

Because, guess what, the guy’s name is now in the TSC computer. For good.

No kidding. The only way to get your name off the list is (ready?) an act of Congress.

In fact, only person who has gotten his name off the list (ready for more?): Nelson Mandela. God only know how his name got on the list in the first place.

So let’s say you have a little kerfluffle coming back from Tijuana, or (heaven forfend) a traffic cop who stops you for speeding spots a copy of the New York Times with a picture of Osama bin Laden in your back seat and decides what the heck to call TSC just to be sure…

Result: According to a Justice Department report on the center, as of April 2007 there were (still ready?) 700,000 names on the list, with 20,000 more being added monthly.

The ACLU and others are naturally (and rightly) upset about this, figuring that by now there must be over a million names in its computer’s fiendish little memory.

Which brings us to the surreal, more-than-Kafkaesque bureaucratic punchline to this latest obscene joke on American freedom. Dismissing the one-million figure as "just plain wrong," the TSC website self-righteously asserts that there are in fact ONLY 450,000 people on the watch list.

There you go. You’ll sleep better now knowing 1) the TSC is doing such a bang-up careful job, and 2) that the odds are only 1 in 400 that your name is on the list. Unless of course any law enforcement official has ever asked the TSC, for whatever reason, to check to see if your name is on the list.

The really good news is this. Even if there are a mere half a million names on the list, following the next terrorist attack, we know one agency is going to be doing a lot of hiring really fast to starting double- and cross-checking all those possible terrorists.

Only absolutely bonkers paranoid obsessive-compulsives need apply.

END

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