When we get wrapped up in the news and the excitement of a significant national event, such as the Democratic Convention, some of us tend to forget that our government, with the impact it has on our daily lives, continues to “govern,” albeit as miserably as ever.
The Iraq war continues; the situation in Afghanistan worsens; Russia has its way with Georgia with impunity; the roadmap to peace in the Middle-East is in tatters; the lousy economic situation gets lousier; domestic surveillance probably continues unabated; habeas corpus continues to be trampled and torture probably continues; and your Homeland Security Team continues to waste your money and make “booboos.”
Just read what the New York Times had to say in an Editorial this past weekend.
In, “That Troubled Terrorism List,” we learn that
A half-billion-dollar emergency program to repair the nation’s main and deeply flawed terrorist watch list is “on the brink of collapse,” according to a Congressional investigation. That means that warning signs of a terrorist attack could again be lost in the chaos.
The new program, known as Railhead, is intended to fix the problems with the current outmoded program. That database — begun as an urgent priority after the Sept. 11 attacks — has been bedeviled by an array of problems, including the inability to do basic searches to find suspects’ names.
And,
Bush administration officials have been pronouncing Railhead a success. But the investigation by a House Science and Technology subcommittee found it crippled by serious design flaws, management blunders and runaway contractors. Hundreds of private contractors from dozens of companies involved were recently laid off as government managers finally ordered a fresh overhaul in the face of “insurmountable” problems.
With respect to matching the names of suspected terrorists with the terrorists themselves, we find that:
Some of the flaws discovered are mind-bogglingly basic. The Railhead database, it seems, also has fundamental problems with its search function. It failed, for example, to handle multiple word searches connected by “and” and “or,” and it could not offer matches for slight misspellings of suspects’ names.
As a matter of fact, the present database seems more prone to match the names of suspected terrorists with innocent Americans.
For example, the terrorism watch list contains the names of well-known terrorists such as retired Air National Guard brigadier general James Robinson; CNN Investigative Correspondent Drew Griffin; Dr. James Smith, a physician from Bloomington; born-in-the-USA Thomas Kubbany, whose middle name happens to be Hassan; and, let’s not forget, probably the most dangerous of them all, 8-year-old James Robinson. Fortunately, he has been on the list since the ripe age of 5.
The New York Times concludes its story with:
The Bush administration is far too focused on pushing through new ways to spy on Americans — like the terrible F.B.I. guidelines that the Justice Department appears poised to approve. Railhead’s shocking deficiencies demonstrate that the administration’s first priority should be getting the nation’s terror-fighting infrastructure in order — and analyzing the data it already has.
But not to worry Democratic Convention goers. The Bush administration is hard at work to ensure that your flight back home is uneventful. Unless, of course, your name is James–or Jim–Robinson, James–or Jim– Smith, or you have one of those “funny” names such as Hassan, Muhammad…or Barack Hussein Obama.
