Any government employee knows about the Combined Federal Campaign, a program to funnel charitible giving by federal employees to worthy charities who register with the program. Employees simply fill out a form and designate one or more charities they want to support, and the deduction comes right out of the paycheck. Simple. Simply harassment also, as the emails, and broadcast voicemails, and signs, and "keyworker" visits pile up at the end of the year. But this year, there is a new outrage: charities who register with the CFC must "certify" that they don't employ terrorists. OK, I get that. But the Bush Administration says this means they have to
vet their employee roster against the terrorist "watch lists".
The ACLU and a number of other charities
withdrew from the CFC as a result. One charity, Breast Cancer Action, addressed the matter in their
regular newsletter as follows:
While some breast cancer organizations may be indifferent to a requirement like this, BCA's social justice framework requires us to take a broad view of the issues we deal with, and to question policies that would in any way hinder our mission to serve everyone who has, or who is at risk for, breast cancer.
The federal terror "watch lists" are problematic for a number of reasons, including their misidentification of people who are not, in fact, terrorists. But for BCA, the biggest problem is that the CFC requirement puts our organization in the position of diverting limited resources to helping the federal government intimidate U.S. citizens and legal residents (federal law already prohibits BCA--and every other employer--from hiring anyone who isn't residing in the United States legally), and making us responsible for tracking down "terrorists" when that responsibility belongs to the government.
* * *
Any time we spend checking government terror lists will necessarily mean that someone with breast cancer won't get the information or referrals she needs.
One of the problems is that the lists smack as much of Elmer Fudd as Big Brother:
The lists that the government wants us [the BCA] to check are notoriously inaccurate, not to mention incredibly prone to being used for racial profiling. Law-abiding people who appear on the lists have no way to remove their names. Even Sen. Ted Kennedy was recently stopped at an airport because a name similar to his appeared on a watch list. The chance that your name might appear on one of these lists is real and very frightening.
So real, in fact, that a fiction writer on a plane doodling dialogue in the margin of his crossword puzzle that included the word "bomb" got stopped, interrogated, and placed on the terror watchlist. No kidding.
But even if this sounds more like an urban legend than reality, the more insidious injustice is the fact that charities who comply will have to think twice about hiring people with Arabic-sounding names.
[T]he three [watch] lists include one that is 143 mind-numbing pages long, containing literally tens of thousands of names plus aliases. Most of the names are transliterations from Arabic and other languages, which cannot be verified. Already, names have appeared on the lists mistakenly, and getting one's name removed from the lists is a Herculean task. It's well known that there are enough alternative spellings of names to make certainty regarding employment just about impossible. Who knows whether the CFC anti-terrorism certification might also apply to a nonprofit's volunteers in addition to their paid employees?
The result? In order to comply--or in order to avoid violating the intent of the policy--many nonprofits are likely to steer clear of anyone whose name might sound like one that would likely appear on these lists, say, any Arabic or Muslim name, for instance.
The impact? Not much would be done to stop terrorism, but innocent people could be denied employment or charities would be denied CFC participation.
While such incidents are the "scary" part of this story, the saddest part is the fact that charities who succumb to the requirement to check their employees against the list will be taking valuable resources away from their charitable missions:
After all, threats of terror aren't the only things affecting U.S. residents. Take, for example, the fact that a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer every 2.5 minutes. BCA should not be forced to choose between doing what the CFC demands and utilizing federal employees' contributions to help women confronting a life-threatening illness.
So, to sum up: federal employees are pressured by management to contribute to the CFC, which in turn pressures charities to their employees against the watch lists, which chills employment opportunities and diverts resources from women with breast cancer, the poor, the environment, animals, veterans, children, medical research, and any beneficiary of any charity on CFC List.