Comment Re:Again, meh (Score 1) 154
I feel that you, Mr. Tubesteak, fundamentally failed to read the post to which you are responding. The poster also indicated that they have not been members of any "suspect" political organizations nor have they committed any crimes. All of these things go into the decisions pertaining to who goes on the watch list.
The worst thing about the watch list is that, in many cases, there is not any explanation necessary regarding how a name got there. By accident? Perhaps someone with the same name and a similar description? Who knows.
The Soviet Union had similar lists. And in the same way, there was no mechanism to permit someone presumably wrongly placed on the list to have it reviewed. Those lists may have had political "enemies of the state" on them: people who identified the misbehavior of the government, or who protested against injustice. Certainly there was no way to confirm or deny such a possibility. If you were on the list you were, by definition, a criminal. You had no right to question the list, and in fact the very act of raising a ruckus about your name being on the list proved that you were an enemy of the state.
How, exactly, does the current U.S. watch list differ? One might hope that it is fair, accurate, and entirely just. But I'd personally suggest that such hope is rather thin.
