Papers Detail Complaints of Links to Treasury List

Source: NYT

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: March 19, 2008
A sheaf of documents that a federal court forced the Treasury Department to release indicate there have been repeated complaints from American consumers who have been falsely linked to terrorism or drug trafficking during routine credit checks, the organization that sought the documents in a lawsuit said Tuesday.

The more than 100 pages of documents released Monday to the organization, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, include a variety of complaints about the list maintained by the Office of Foreign Asset Control in the Treasury Department, said Philip Hwang, a lawyer for the group.

The documents include e-mail messages from a Navy veteran who had been unable to use the Internet service PayPal, and an 18-year-old who wrote to say that he was not a Libyan minister who was apparently on the list.

A client of a Maryland Toyota dealer reported being checked by a salesperson for tattoos because of a Treasury list match.

A Treasury Department official was baffled by the last claim, saying information on the list did not include physical characteristics.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/19/us/19suit.html?ref=washington

on this huge, scattershot, spectacularly flawed list.

K&R