Terror lists rife with inconsistencies

WASHINGTON, March 18 (UPI) -- U.S. justice and intelligence reports said law enforcement agencies lack a general sense of uniformity in their creation of terrorist watch lists.

Inspectors general reports for the Justice Department and the Director of National Intelligence found "procedures vary across the intelligence community" that cause discrepancies in "nominations" to terrorist watch lists, The Washington Post said Tuesday.

The reports found methods used by the FBI and other agencies to develop the watch lists translate to near autonomous nomination to those lists.

FBI field offices submit a nomination "package" to the Terrorist Review and Examination Unit, or TREX, which goes to the Terrorist Screening Center.

The report said the FBI didn't keep its records up to date and found its files were "often incomplete or contained inaccuracies."

The U.S. government says it retains data submitted to terrorist watch lists for as long as 99 years. There were more than 720,000 records in the database as of last April, the Post said.

Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, said the office of the director of national intelligence is formulating a draft policy to ensure uniformity in the standards and practices employed by the entire intelligence community.