Bulletin: Any terrorists using their real names may be questioned

Are you on the list?

“U.S. security agents have a master list of five million people worldwide thought to be potential terrorists or criminals, officials say. ‘The U.S. lookout index contains some five million names of known terrorists and other persons representing a potential problem,’ Brian Davis, a senior Canadian immigration official in Paris, said in a confidential document obtained by the Sun.

“Names on the list are compared against those applying for visas or on flights travelling to the U.S..” (emphasis added)

Aside from being horrendously ungrammatical, this last sentence has other, more serious problems. Though in fairness, the problems don’t have as much to do with the sentence as they do with the logic being bandied about by it. Specifically, something that Canadian visa officers are quick to pick up on:

“Davis said Canadian visa officers abroad do not keep an extensive list like the U.S. because terrorists can use bogus documents and change their identities.”

Imagine that.