Brian Beutler reports that the government's terrorist watch list is growing at a clip of 20,000 records a month. That's a list four times the size of even the most liberal estimate for the number of actual bad guys out there:
It remains unknown how many names on the list are part of government-designated terrorist groups. That is classified. The list is, however, known to include members of all the familiars -- including Al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, and affiliates of the IRA and the Tamil Tigers.The exact size of some of these groups is hard to pin down, but plenty of information about them is publicly available. Al-Qaeda is believed to have on the order of 10,000 members. Hamas has several hundred armed militants, out of a total affiliation of around 6,000 people. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, Hezbollah "consists of several thousand militants and activists" and the Revolutionary Guard Corps -- recently declared by the administration to be a terrorist organization, and the largest of the groups -- has about 125,000 members. The IRA, by contrast, has only about 1,000 active members, according to the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, and the Tamil Tigers rivals Al-Qaeda with about 8,000.Not all of the members of these organizations are directly involved in violent operations, and many lack the operational capacity to commit acts of terrorism. But even using the most liberal estimates, these groups total about 200,000 people. Assuming every one of those members is on the list -- a laughable assumption -- it would reflect an accuracy of only 23 percent.
Read the rest (and comment) here. --The Editors
