1 in 500 Americans is a terrorist supporter?

That seems ridiculously high, doesn’t it?

Well, the GAO says the Terrorist Watch List is now up to about 800,000 names. In a nation of roughly 300 million people, that would break down to 1 in 400 Americans.

But of course, some names are duplicates or aliases. Some are non-U.S. citizens. So let’s say 1 in 500 Americans. Still — that’s an awful lot of terrorist supporters. And of course, our government won’t allow us to know why our names are being put on the list, nor is there a clear process for being taken off. Needless to say, I am not confident that this list makes us safer.

Full report (pdf). I particularly like the bit on page 11, where the researchers confide that the CIA refused to talk to them. Way to work together, guys.

(Via Wired, via ACS.)

A helpful tip

The inimitable Daniel Davies:

Mahmoud Ahamdinejad’s name is fucking difficult to spell. It’s also difficult to pronounce. This forms the basis for my latest raft of pronouncements on international affairs.

It is based on the Davies BBC Pronunciation Department Theory Of Geopolitics, which basically states that the importance of any foreigner to the politics of the UK can be reasonably assessed by looking at how much trouble the newsreaders take to get his name right. In general, the BBC appears to believe that all foreigners are pissy little no-marks and you pronounce their names phonetically as if they were English words.

I’d say the theory holds for the U.S., too.

Viz, the pronunciation of Ahmadinejad’s name (which is actually much easier to spell than Khruschev’s if you remember that it is actually a double-barrelled name – Ahmadi-Nejad – the Guardian actually used to spell it this way for a short while but seems to have given up). This is basically pronounced as “I’m a dinner jacket”.

Go see what he has to say about the rest of the world’s leaders.