WASHINGTON: The FBI is permitted to include people on the US government's terrorist watch list even if they have been acquitted of terrorism-related offences or the charges are dropped, newly-released documents say.
The files, released by the FBI under the Freedom of Information Act, disclose how the police are instructed to react if they encounter a person on the list.
They lay out, for the first time in public view, the legal standard national security officials must meet in order to add a name to the list. And they shed new light on how names are vetted for possible removal from the list.
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Inclusion on the watch list can keep terrorism suspects off planes, block non-citizens from entering the country and subject people to delays and greater scrutiny at airports, border crossings and traffic stops.
The database now has about 420,000 names, including about 8000 Americans, according to the statistics released in connection with the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks.
About 16,000 people, including about 500 Americans, are barred from flying.
Timothy Healy, the director of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Centre - which vets requests to add or remove names from the list - said the documents showed the government was balancing civil liberties with a careful, multilayered process for vetting who goes on it and for making sure names that no longer need to be on it came off.
The 91 pages of files include a December 2010 guidance memo to FBI field offices showing that even a not-guilty verdict may not always be enough to get someone off the list, if agents maintain they still have ''reasonable suspicion'' that the person might have ties to terrorism.
A lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, Ginger McCall, said: ''In the United States, you are supposed to be assumed innocent. But on the watch list, you may be assumed guilty, even after the court dismisses your case.''
The New York Times
