The wife of Alaska Senator Ted Stevens has had problems getting on airplanes because of it.

Even retired commercial pilot Captain Robert Campbell, who flew for the US Navy during the Vietnam war, is affected by it.

It is the US government's terrorist watch list, which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says has swollen into a catalogue of a million names in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

The ACLU said it derived that figure from a Justice Department report on the FBI's Terrorist Screening Centre, which consolidates terrorist watch list information.

The Centre 'had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month,' according to a report by the Justice Department Inspector General, the rights group said.

'By those numbers, the list now has over one million names on it,' the ACLU said last week.

And that, says the ACLU's Technology and Liberty Program director, Mr Barry Steinhardt, is absurd.

'If there were a million terrorists threatening the United States our streets would be aflame,' he told AFP.

'The lowest number they'll admit to,' he said, referring to the US government, 'is 20,000.'

'Twenty-thousand terrorists in America poised to strike? This is a bloated list and has to be fixed.'

But Mr Leonard Boyle, director of the Terrorist Screening Centre, said there are not one million names on the list, and argued that it was an effective anti-terror tool.

In an opinion piece published last week in the Washington Post, he argued the list enhances information-sharing and helps 'officials obtain information to make better-informed decisions when they encounter an individual on the list'.

Mr Boyle also denied that thousands of Americans are detained and inconvenienced daily because their names are on the list.

Roman Catholic nun, Sister Glenn Anne McPhee, who used to be education secretary at the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, was on the list - apparently because an Afghan man used McPhee as an alias - according to the ACLU and San Francisco Faith, an online news sheet for the diocese where the sister now works.

For months starting in October 2003, she faced hassles when she travelled by air.

'Once, Sister related, she said to a police officer, something to the effect that if this were Northern Ireland, I would understand,' San Francisco Faith wrote.

'I'll pretend I didn't hear that, or otherwise I would have to arrest you,' the officer reportedly told the nun, who 'didn't say anything' after that.

A flight from London with Mr Cat Stevens on board - the singer who converted to Islam and changed his name to Yusuf Islam - was diverted and forced to land in Maine when US officials became aware that Islam, or Stevens, was on board.

The singer, who has no terrorist record under either name, was denied entry to the United States.

His namesake, Cat (short for Catherine) Stevens, the wife of a US Senator, has had problems flying because her name is Cat Stevens, the ACLU says.

Then there's Mr Robert Campbell, who was a commercial pilot for 22 years and also flew for the US Navy.

'I'm authorised by the Transportation Security Administration to fly the airplane... but if I want to ride in the back, I'm on the no-fly list,' he said in an interview with US television in 2007.

It's unclear why Mr Campbell's name is on the list. What is clear is that having the same name as someone who is being watched makes for troublesome travels.

Getting your name removed from the list is reportedly extremely difficult.

Mr Nelson Mandela needed a Congressional order and Sister Glenn Anne got a bishop to ask Karl Rove, then President Bush's top political adviser, to intercede on her behalf.

The real irony of the massive list is that many suspected or known terrorists are not on it.

'Many of the names of actual terrorists do not make the list that is sent downstream to people that use it: airlines, airline reservation agencies, government law enforcement and border officials,' Mr Steinhardt told AFP.

'They often don't send the names of the worst terrorists down to the people who need to know, because they're afraid if they do and the lists are floating around out there, they'll be putting those names in the public sphere,' he said.

But - isn't that what the list is meant to do? -- AFP