One million on US terrorist watch list: rights group

WASHINGTON (AFP) — A watch list of suspected and known terrorists, compiled by the US authorities, has ballooned and contains more than one million names, the American Civil Liberties Union said Monday.

The ACLU said it derived that figure from a Justice Department report on the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, which consolidates terrorist watch list information.

The Center "had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month," according to a report by the Justice Department Inspector General, the rights group said.

"By those numbers, the list now has over one million names on it," the ACLU said in a statement.

Among those on the watch list are deceased people, such as former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein who was hanged in 2005, decorated war veterans, and US ...