Benchmarks are normally a good thing. Milestones are even better. Especially when we are talking about important matters such as national security, securing our ports and keeping the skies above us safe.

But this week a dubious milestone has been passed by the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List, which, according the American Civil Liberties Union, has accumulated more than 1 million names.

At the National Press Club on Monday, the ACLU gathered several individuals who claim they are on the list in error, and drew attention to horror stories they say the program has created.

“Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ‘suspicious characters,’ with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office.

Jim Robinson says he is on the list, and clearly not someone we need to worry about. Sure, he might be a Washington lawyer, but he seems to love his country, and says he would consider the relative inconvenience of missed flights and airport hassling a worthy price to pay if it served some broader terror-fighting goals.

“It’s a pain in the neck,” he says, “and significantly interferes with my travel arrangements. I suppose if I were convinced that America is a safer place because I get hassled at the airport, I might put up with it, but I doubt it.”

Perhaps I should have mentioned that Robinson probably has more security clearances than any of the investigators who routinely question him, having once headed up the Justice Department’s criminal division during the Bill Clinton years.

He is just one of the individuals we are spending millions of dollars each year to investigate each time he goes to an airport.

The ACLU arrived at the million-man milestone by taking the 700,000 cited in September by the Inspector General and adding 20,000 each month after. The FBI disputes the figure and says the list is closer to 400,000 people, 95 percent of whom are foreigners.

No matter the exact numbers, the ACLU is on the warpath against government overreach. 

“Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon,” said Fredrickson.

Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s Technology and Liberty Program, was at the press club event with Akif Rahman, an American citizen who says he has been interrogated several times and was once detained for five hours, shackled to a chair, and kicked while trying to enter the country from Canada.

“America’s new million record watch list is a perfect symbol for what’s wrong with this administration’s approach to security,” said Steinhardt. “It’s unfair, out of control, a waste of resources, treats the rights of the innocent as an afterthought, and is a very real impediment in the lives of millions of travelers.”

On the most basic level, it is hard to imagine a list of a million names being much use to anyone in law enforcement. On another level, if I were an investigator looking for bad guys, I would be hesitant to put my real names on any list that I knew would be floating around every airport in America.

Injustices or not, we have not been attacked since Sept. 11, 2001, and the Bush administration should get credit for that. But, with the events of Sept. 11 shrinking in our rearview mirrors, it is human nature to let our guard down and increase our whining about security nuisances we encounter.

Having said that, it seems like it’s time to retire the watch list and start over. It would be nice if we could also address the concerns of those who have to argue themselves through airport security regularly.

We also need to think about putting the bulk of our screening resources into the real-time threat assessments of trained, smart, undercover investigators, as opposed to some of the ridiculous scenes that most airport travelers see.

An 85-year-old Scandinavian grandmother being pulled aside for special security comes to mind.

Sometimes I get the idea that this kind of choreography has more to do with putting the fear of God into the rest of us who are looking on.

It is not fair to suspect someone because of the way they look, but 15 of the Sept. 11 hijackers were from one country, not even just the same region.

I am not suggesting racial profiling, and the ACLU would not approve if I did. But a system that routinely and repeatedly “catches” the same non-terrorists, whose names just happen to be similar to those of real suspects, obviously needs some major tweaks. Just ask Ted Kennedy and Nelson Mandela.

You can reach Jim Mills at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it