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My Wish: To Be Off This List
Who has a list and is checking it twice? Not just Santa. The United States government has a list too, called the Terrorist Watch List. The list has names of people that the government thinks might be connected to terrorism in some way. But there is a problem with the list. It has over 755,000 names on it, and some of the people with those names aren't terrorists.
Any time somebody whose name is on the list tries to board an airplane, they can be stopped. Their name is checked by the terrorist-screening center in the Department of Homeland Security. That's no fun for the people who aren't terrorists and just want to travel without being stopped. One kid named John William Anderson is on the list and he's only six years old!
Every month, 2,000 people ask for their names to be taken off the list, but the Terrorist Screening Center doesn't have the time to do that kind of work, so those people just get stopped over and over. And the number of names on the list continues to grow.
In addition to tracking people who might be connected to terrorism, the US government puts countries on a similar list. North Korea, Iran, Cuba, and Sudan are four countries that the US calls State Sponsors of Terrorism.
I'm Ben and that's what happened in our nation this week.
Let's play Pinpoint to locate countries from my story.
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