There are now 80,000 names on the U.S. government’s secret terror (“no-fly”) watchlist, according to a new report. Before 9/11, just 16 names were on the list, and by the end of the year the number jumped to 1,000. By 2002, the list had 40,000 names.

But the list hasn’t been used to just stop terrorists. Some of the names on that list belong to U.S. lawmakers:

Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA), 2004:

U.S. Sen. Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy said yesterday that he was stopped and questioned at airports on the East Coast five times in March because his name appeared on the government’s secret “no-fly” list. [Federal air security officials] acknowledged being embarrassed that it took the senator and his staff more than three weeks to get his name removed.

Rep. John D. Lewis (D-GA), 2004:

Rep. John Lewis, D – Georgia, a nine-term congressman famous for his civil rights work with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., has been stopped 35 to 40 times over the past year, his office said…Lewis contacted the Department of Transportation, the Department of Homeland Security and executives at various airlines in a so-far fruitless effort to get his name off the list, said spokeswoman Brenda Jones.

Rep. Don Young (R-AK), 2004:

Rep. Donald E. Young (R-Alaska), said he was flagged on the “watch list” when the airline computer system mistook him for a man on the list named Donald Lee Young.

Feeling safer?

The McCain anti-torture amendment has twice been passed by the U.S. Senate. The Senate voted 90-9 to include it in the “must pass” Defense Department Appropriations bill for FY 2006; for good measure, senators later attached the amendment to the Defense Department Authorization bill as well.

Despite this overwhelming support, the amendment’s final passage is not assured. The White House and congressional conservatives have developed a two-pronged strategy to prevent the amendment from becoming law.

1) Vice President Cheney has been seeking changes that would effectively gut the amendment, by exempting CIA interrogations from compliance with the requirements.

Even before the latest revelations about detainees being held at secret CIA “black sites,” supporters of the McCain amendment had made clear that such an exemption would render the amendment worse than current law.

The latest reports suggest that the White House is finally getting the message, and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley has been negotiating with Senator McCain in hopes of securing modest but potentially problematic changes intended to minimize the exposure of U.S. intelligence officers to prosecution for alleged abuses. Those negotiations could be concluded within the next few days.

2) The Administration has also threatened a veto of each of the two Defense bills if the McCain amendment remains attached to them. At this point it remains unclear which of the two bills containing the McCain amendment will move first.

The House could move to appoint conferees on the appropriations bill before the end of the week. Meanwhile, the Armed Services Committees are laboring to resolve this and dozens of other issues regarding the authorization bill in hopes of passing it at any time.

One likely scenario is for conservatives to allow the authorization bill to pass with the McCain amendment attached and intact, at which point appropriators would seek to strip it from the “must pass” appropriations bill before it also passes. This would enable the President to sign the appropriations bill but make good his threat to veto the authorization, thus killing the amendment.

To forestall that risk, appropriations conferees who support the McCain amendment will seek to block any effort to drop the amendment from the appropriations bill unless the White House promises that the President to sign the authorization bill as well.

Whichever bill reaches the finish line first, it looks increasingly likely that the McCain amendment will become law. Our nation and the world will be the better for it.

– Mark Agrast