Excerpt:
The Justice Department has now found that the FBI's terrorist watch list is flawed. Not only does the list consist of a mind-boggling 1.1 million names of 400,000 people, the Justice Department has also found that the FBI was "sometimes dangerously slow to add suspects to the nation's terrorist watch list, and even slower to remove those cleared of suspicion." As many as 24,000 people have been incorrectly kept on that list.
I have firsthand experience with the inefficacy of this list. Every time I travel overseas, I am subjected to extensive searches and wasteful questioning. This is a waste of scarce government resources. Let me illustrate a typical encounter at the border.
About a year and a half ago, my wife and I (both U.S. citizens) were returning home after my Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca. Upon landing at New York's JFK airport, we were met by two DHS officers who stood at the end of the jet way scanning the passport of every passenger who stepped off that airplane. Along with several other returning pilgrims, we were escorted into a special room where I found over two dozen other people awaiting questioning. When my turn came, the officer asked me to explain why I was being stopped for additional questioning. I answered that since I did not stop myself to be questioned, how am I supposed to know why was I singled out? I added that one reason for my special treatment is perhaps the fact that I am a Muslim. Such profiling is supposed to be illegal and the officer dutifully pointed that out. However, overwhelming numbers of people waiting additional questioning were visibly Muslims, most of them American citizens returning from Hajj.