Last week the British government published a list of people banned from entering the country. The list included radio shock jock Michael Savage, thus guaranteeing it wide publicity and considerable condemnation. But wait! We ban people too. We just don’t make our list public. Graham Bowley reports:
To make the Coordinated Terrorist Watchlist, which has been maintained since 2003, you have to be “reasonably” suspected of “involvement in terrorist activity,” according to Chad Kolton, spokesman for the F.B.I.’s Terrorist Screening Center in northern Virginia. It can be fund-raising or recruiting, “but it’s a fairly high standard,” he said, and so probably does not include simply speaking about terrorism.
“Probably”? Why does this not reassure me?
