Inaccuracies persist

Wednesday, March 19, 2008 | 2:04 a.m.

Two new federal reports say that, almost seven years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, U.S. security agencies still do not have a consistent procedure for placing people on or taking them off the government’s main terrorist watch list.

A spokesman for the director of national intelligence’s office told The Washington Post this week the agency’s inspector general has found that government agencies’ methods for naming people to the U.S. terrorist watch list vary so widely that the list is rife with inconsistencies.

Separately, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine released a report Monday that says the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies are placing outdated or inaccurate information on the list. Fine also said these agencies have not devised a sufficient method for removing the names of people after the government has determined they are not a threat.

After the terrorist attacks in 2001, federal law enforcement officials discovered the United States lacked a coordinated effort to keep tabs on suspected terrorists, so the government created the watch list. The FBI has oversight of the list, which includes names submitted by such federal law enforcement agencies as the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Marshals Service.

But Fine noted in his report that because of the FBI’s tangled bureaucratic process, it can take four months to put someone on the list. Removing someone from the list brings another web of red tape and delays.

What’s more, Fine says, the FBI has failed to update terrorist investigation records, so the records from field offices that Fine reviewed were “often incomplete or contained inaccuracies.” Current information is essential, the inspector general said, for properly identifying terrorism suspects and for “reducing misidentifications of innocent individuals who are not suspected terrorists.”

This isn’t the first time the federal watch list has been criticized. Privacy advocates have long said the shoddy record keeping does not adequately protect innocent Americans from being named as terrorism suspects.

The Bush administration has had ample time nearly seven years to figure out how federal law enforcement agencies should collect, analyze and log data regarding suspected terrorists and to develop a procedure to clear the names of those found to pose no risk. That this problem persists illustrates the depth of this administration’s ineptitude in handling the security of our nation.