5
#000000
#FFFFFF
For Immediate Release
May, 06 2009, 06:35pm EDT
Contact:
Mandy Simon, (202) 675-2312; media@dcaclu.org
FBI Inspector General Reports 35 Percent Error Rate on Terror Watchlist
A report released today by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General found that the FBI's terrorist watchlist may contain a 35 percent error rate. The audit revealed that large portions of the list are governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records. The audit confirms that the nation's watchlist system is massively broken.
WASHINGTON
A report released today by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General found that the FBI's terrorist watchlist may contain a 35 percent error rate. The audit revealed that large portions of the list are governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records. The audit confirms that the nation's watchlist system is massively broken.
"This report strongly suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified as terrorists," said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. "This is yet more confirmation of what we've been saying for years - that the watchlist is not only unfair for travelers, but it is also a waste of scarce resources. It is time for Congress to haul the watchlist policymakers up to Capitol Hill to answer some tough questions."
The audit also confirms the ACLU's estimates that the terror watchlist consists of an unmanageable and non-credible 1.1 million names as of December 2008. In "The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Terrorist Watchlist Nomination Practices" inspector general auditors reviewed 68,669 of those identities and found 24,000 were out of date. In a closer inspection of the out of date records, the auditors found a majority of this sample did not even belong on a watchlist.
Last year, the ACLU noted the addition of the one millionth record on the terror watchlist. At the time, federal officials called the count "overblown."
In addition to confirming the ACLU's 2008 count, today's report also documents a widespread failure to scrub the lists by removing names after cases have been closed. For example, one subject stayed on the watchlist for almost five years after the case was resolved; two people on the list were dead. The FBI attempted to place one individual on the watchlist by reclassifying that person as an international terrorist after already having been cleared of wrongdoing by an FBI investigation.
The report also identified more than 50,000 records with no explanation of why they were on the list, making it impossible to remove them. It described the controls for placing many names on the list as "weak or nonexistent."
"This IG report reveals just what a comedy of errors the watchlist is," said Chris Calabrese, attorney with the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program. "But we did not need this report to know there is a problem with the effectiveness of any terrorist watchlist that includes over a million names. It certainly explains why Congressman John Lewis and Senator Edward Kennedy have problems when they try to fly."
For ACLU news release on the one millionth name on the watchlist, go to https://www.aclu.org/privacy/35968prs20080714.html
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
(212) 549-2666LATEST NEWS
Hegseth Says Trump Has Vision of 'Greater North America.' Critics Alarmed by 'Greater Israel' Parallel
"Right now the US and Israel are realizing 'Greater Israel' by attacking-invading Lebanon and Iran," said one professor. "Hegseth is saying it's Greenland, Cuba, Canada, and Mexico next."
Mar 30, 2026
Alarm mounted Monday over the Trump administration's "Greater North America" plan, a geopolitical blueprint for US imperial hegemony from Greenland to Guyana that's drawing comparisons with a messianic project being pushed by President Donald Trump's far-right allies and war partners in Israel.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth first unveiled the plan earlier this month, telling reporters: "Trump has drawn a new strategic map, from Greenland to the Gulf of America to the Panama Canal and its surrounding countries. At the Department of War we call this strategic map the Greater North America."
"Why? Because every sovereign nation and territory north of the Equator, from Greenland to Ecuador and from Alaska to Guyana, is not part of the 'Global South,'" Hegseth added. "It is our immediate security perimeter in this great neighborhood that we all live in."
Graeme Garrard, a Canadian professor at Cardiff University in Wales, said Monday on social media in response to Hegseth's comments: "By 'Greater North America' he means 'Greater United States. The US is now and has long been a menace and threat to the sovereignty and independence of its hemispheric neighbors."
Numerous observers have compared Trump's "Greater America" with the "Greater Israel" movement, whose most zealous proponents want to conquer everything between the Nile and Euphrates rivers—that is, all of Palestine, Lebanon, and Jordan; most of Syria and Kuwait; large parts of Egypt and Iraq; and some of Turkey—for Israel.
"Hesgeth's 'Greater North America' should be taken VERY seriously as a real threat," University of Lausanne professor Julia Steinberger, who is Swiss-American, said on social media. "Right now the US and Israel are realizing 'Greater Israel' by attacking-invading Lebanon and Iran. Hegseth is saying it's Greenland, Cuba, Canada, and Mexico next."
Based on the biblical boundaries of ancient Jewish kingdoms, Greater Israel is rooted in the supremacist supposition that the Abrahamic deity figure God promised the Jews all of the lands between the Nile and Euphrates.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza—and other prominent right-wing Israelis support the Greater Israel vision and are working to make it a reality by accelerating the illegal settler colonization and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, preparing to annex the dwindling Palestinian territories, and planning to occupy—perhaps permanently—parts of Syria and Lebanon.
For nearly two centuries, claims of divine favor have also underpinned US expansionism, most famously expressed in Manifest Destiny and mid-19th century plans to annex lands "from the Arctic to the Tropic." This notion drove the US conquest of half of Mexico, as well as later takeovers of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti. The US also took control over the Panama Canal, which it built at the cost of thousands of laborers' lives, most of them from Barbados and other West Indies isles.
"It is part of the great law of progress that the weak should give way to the strong, and that the superior should displace the inferior races," one New Orleans newspaper opined in 1848.
Nearly 178 years later, Hegseth echoed this supremacist ideology, telling Latin American leaders that the region must remain "Christian nations under God" and stand united in the face of "radical narco-communism."
Like the 19th century US imperialists, Trump has also repeatedly expressed his goal of "taking Cuba"—an objective that goes back over 200 years, when Thomas Jefferson, then a former president, called the island “the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states."
Keep Reading
Show Less
'Inspiring': Washington Enacts Millionaires' Tax to Help Working Families
The head of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy praised state policymakers for "listening to the demands of the people to create a less regressive state tax system."
Mar 30, 2026
While nearby California prepares for a November vote to tax the ultrarich, Democratic Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson on Monday signed state legislation that creates a tax on income over $1 million in a single year.
"Adoption of the historic Millionaires' Tax makes our tax system more fair, and means free meals for K-12 students, the largest tax break in state history for small businesses, eliminating the sales tax for baby diapers, and sending a check to nearly 500,000 working families to make life more affordable," Ferguson highlighted in a statement.
Senate Bill 6346, sponsored by state Sen. Jamie Pedersen (D-43), was delivered to the governor earlier this month after passing the upper chamber 27-21. In the Washington House of Representatives, where the companion bill was led by Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon (D-34), it was approved 51-46.
"With this bill, we're going to begin to right a historic wrong that has plagued our state for nearly 100 years, and made our tax system one of the worst and most regressive in the entire country," said Pedersen. "We've asked Washington's working families for far too long to shoulder far too much of the tax burden for the things we care about, and we have not asked enough of our wealthiest neighbors. The Millionaires' Tax represents hope and change for people in communities like mine, and across the state."
Bloomberg reported Monday that before adopting the law, which "applies a 9.9% levy on the roughly 30,000 taxpayers in the state who make more than $1 million a year," Washington was one of just nine states without an income tax
Washington lawmakers previously "made progress in recent years by creating and later enhancing their capital gains excise tax," but its "tax structure has been woefully unequal, ranking as the second-most regressive state and local tax system in the country," according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP).
"Inequality is at a historic high and billionaires are walking away with ever-larger shares of our country’s collective wealth," ITEP executive director Amy Hanauer said in a Monday statement. "With those in charge at the federal level passing policies that only make this worse, it is incumbent upon states to come up with solutions. It is inspiring to see Washington listening to the demands of the people to create a less regressive state tax system."
Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson has officially signed into law a new tax on millionaires.The 9.9% tax on income above $1 million is projected to raise up to $3 billion in 2029 after it takes effect in 2028.That money will go towards public education, child care, and expanding the state's EITC.
— ITEP (@itep.org) March 30, 2026 at 1:25 PM
Last year, congressional Republicans and President Donald Trump used the GOP's narrow majorities to pass a budget package, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, that provided the rich with more tax breaks while slashing programs for working families, such as Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
Ferguson signed Washington's bill as Republicans in Congress prepare for this year's budget package, which they aim to pass ahead of the November midterm elections, and other states and localities consider measures to tax the rich and use the revenue to better serve the working class.
As historian Lawrence Wittner detailed in an opinion piece for Common Dreams last week, "Campaigns for state tax-the-rich legislation are flourishing in California, Colorado, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, and Virginia, and have already succeeded in getting such legislation adopted in Massachusetts and Washington."
US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) headed to New York City on Sunday to boost an effort by NYC's newly elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to pressure Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul to raise taxes on the rich. He addressed a rally at Lehman College in the Bronx.
"The people of the city, the people of this state, the people of this country, they do not want to see our kids go hungry," Sanders said. "They do not want people to sleep out on the street or lack healthcare. They want the very rich to start paying their fair share of taxes."
At the federal level, Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) earlier this month introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Their Fair Share Act. They were followed last week by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), lead sponsors of the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act. However, neither bill is expected to get through the current Congress.
Washington makes history today! Gov. Bob Ferguson just signed the Millionaires Tax into law!For too long, the wealthiest few have paid a smaller share while working families carried the load.
[image or embed]
— Washington State Democrats (@wadems.org) March 30, 2026 at 1:28 PM
Like in Washington, DC, efforts to tax the rich are still facing pushback in Washington state. After Ferguson's signature, Citizen Action Defense Fund announced its intention to sue, with executive director Jackson Maynard declaring that "since lawmakers and the governor have chosen to ignore both the constitution and decades of settled case law, we will act."
According to KUOW, during the bill signing event in Olympia that featured remarks from not only the governor but also the bill sponsors, a small business owner, and a tech executive, Ferguson acknowledged that "there's going to be a public conversation around this in the days and weeks and months ahead, as there should be of something of this historic nature."
"Putting front and center those perspectives you just heard, I think, will be critical," he asserted, "because when Washingtonians hear the benefits that flow to working families, to businesses large and small, to kids in schools with those free meals, for childcare services for thousands of Washington families, it's going to make a huge, huge difference."
Keep Reading
Show Less
Advocates Demand Repeal of Israeli Death Penalty Law Explicitly Targeting Palestinians
"There is nothing legal about an occupying power using the death penalty exclusively for the people it occupies," said one historian.
Mar 30, 2026
Leading international human rights groups as well as organizations in Israel swiftly demanded the repeal of a law passed by the Israeli Knesset on Monday that makes death by hanging the default punishment for Palestinians convicted of deadly attacks on Israelis—a law that one group called "discriminatory by design."
Those were the words of the Association of Civil Rights in Israel, which petitioned the country's Supreme Court minutes after lawmakers passed an amendment to the federal penal law, "Death Penalty for Terrorists," in a vote of 62-48.
The group called on the high court to challenge the new law and said the far-right government had passed it "without legal authority" over Palestinians in the West Bank, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government aimed to illegally annex to Israel.
The Association of Civil Rights was joined by groups including Amnesty International, which has spoken out forcefully against the legislation in recent months, in demanding the death penalty law be repealed.
Amnesty said that under the new policy, Israel—which has vehemently rejected accusations of imposing apartheid policies on Palestinians—"explicitly creates two legal frameworks for the use of the death penalty in the occupied West Bank... and in Israel."
The law also does not allow for any pardons for those sentenced to death, making it "one of the world’s most extreme death penalty laws," said Amnesty.
The new law demands that Palestinians be put to death by hanging if convicted of nationalistic killings in a military court, and gives Israeli courts the option of sentencing Israeli citizens to capital punishment if they're convicted of similar crimes.
But Amichai Cohen, a senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute’s Center for Democratic Values and Institutions, told The Associated Press that only Palestinians will ultimately be killed under the law.
“It will apply in Israeli courts, but only to terrorist activities that are motivated by the wish to undermine the existence of Israel," Cohen told the AP. "That means Jews will not be indicted under this law."
Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty International’s senior director of research, advocacy, policy, and campaigns, noted that Israeli military courts "have a conviction rate of over 99% for Palestinian defendants and... are notorious for disregarding due process and fair trial safeguards."
"Israel is brazenly granting itself carte blanche to execute Palestinians while stripping away the most basic fair-trial safeguards,” said Guevara-Rosas.
She added that the law was passed weeks after the Israeli military attorney general dropped all charges against five Israel Defense Forces soldiers accused of raping a Palestinian prisoner—"a decision celebrated by the prime minister and several ministers."
“It speaks volumes to the extent of Israel’s dehumanization of Palestinians that this law has passed" after those charges were dropped, said Guevara-Rosas. "For years, we have seen an alarming pattern of apparent extrajudicial executions and other unlawful killings of Palestinians—with the perpetrators also enjoying near-total impunity. This new law which allows for state-sanctioned executions is a culmination of such policies.”
Celebrations were seen among Netanyahu's top ministers once again on Monday, with National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—whose Otzma Yehudit Party initially introduced the amendment—seen clutching a bottle of champagne after the passage was announced.
Historian Assal Rad noted that much of the international coverage of the bill's passage has used "procedural language to sanitize the story and make it sound legitimate."
The law, however, "is just another way for Israel to kill Palestinians," she said.
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor warned that "the most dangerous aspect of the new law lies in its application within a judicial system that lacks any guarantees of a fair trial for Palestinians."
"Confessions are often obtained under duress, access to effective legal representation is severely limited, the presumption of innocence is routinely ignored, and there are major restrictions on appeals or access to documents essential for the defense," said the group.
"Combined with a lack of judicial independence and integrity in proceedings, applying the death penalty in this context cannot be considered a legitimate judicial measure," the organization added. "Instead, it constitutes an arbitrary deprivation of life, in direct violation of fundamental principles of international human rights law."
Keep Reading
Show Less
Most Popular