THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Just because they are not terrists doesn't mean it's not working. Consider the case of Kiernan O'Dwyer.

Every time Kiernan O'Dwyer arrived at the airport after traveling overseas in recent years, he was flagged as a potential terrorist. But his uniform was a dead giveaway to his true identity: He is a veteran pilot for American Airlines.

U.S. customs agents have stopped him about 80 times since 2003, apparently because his name and birth date nearly match those of an Irish Republican Army leader, one of at least 300,000 names on the U.S. government's watch lists. O'Dwyer falls under an unenviable category of false positives, people who are wrongly detained because some of their personal information matches that of a terrorist or other suspect....

....All his problems began in 2003, after O'Dwyer returned from a trip to Europe. Reaching the customs desk at John F. Kennedy International Airport, he was stunned when officials pulled him aside for further screening. He showed them his passport. He had no criminal record. Ninety minutes later, he was cleared.

But he kept getting detained -- so often that customs agents took to greeting him by his first name.

"They'd look at their screen and know I'd been screened and say, 'Oh boy, you've been through here a bunch,' " he recalled.

O'Dwyer even carried a letter from the Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations saying, "(Y)ou are not, nor have you ever been, on record as a criminal suspect."

But, he said, customs officers told him the letter could have been forged. He said he offered to submit to fingerprints, just as foreign flight crews do, but to no avail.

O'Dwyer become so frustrated that he gave up flying internationally in May, a move that he said cost him $10,000 a year in salary and expenses. He said he is still stopped when he reaches the domestic gate, and a supervisor must help him get cleared.

So even though they recognize him and have a record of his encounters, they still make him go through the drill. But is his plight any worse than the wife of Sen. Ted Stevens?

Among them was Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who complained that his wife, Catherine, was being identified as "Cat" Stevens and frequently stopped due to confusion with the former name of the folk singer now known as Yusuf Islam, whose name is on the list. In 2004 he was denied entry into the U.S., but officials declined to explain why.

Gotta love the Bushoviks, fighting competence and good sense since 2001.