Senator suffers from US security laws

As an example of the harm the newly adopted security laws giving power to the government in the USA, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, "discussing the problems faced by ordinary citizens mistakenly placed on terrorist watch lists," said that he himself was placed on the list and faced travel difficulties as a result of that, the New York Times said yesterday.

The report quoted the Senator as having been prevented from boarding airplanes, several times. The problem lasted for some time, and even as a senator and an influential politician, he had to wait a period of time before his problem was resolved, thus questioning how ordinary people will be able to deal with such mistakes by the government.

The New York Times report said that the error stemmed from Kennedy's name being used as an alias by a terrorist, and even after this error was supposedly corrected, the Senator still encountered difficulties, one more time, as a result from being placed on the terrorist watch list. Worth noting is that the Senator is of Irish descent.

When the names of the US watch lists is suspected to be mostly composed of Arab and Muslim names, where such names may sound similar to those on the list, it is not clear how many had suffered or will suffer from such problems.