MARK STEYN GETS IT WRONG (AGAIN)

As soon as I heard about the attempted terrorist attack on the Northwest plane, I expected that the wingers would not be able to resist turning this near-tragedy into an opportunity for more agit-prop and Mark Steyn is one of the many who has fulfilled my expectation. In an NRO piece, he writes "A man is on the no-fly list but is allowed to board the plane." The truth is that he wasn't on the "no-fly list":

The suspect’s name was inserted last month into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or Tide. About 550,000 individuals are registered in the database. A subset of that is the Terrorist Screening Data Base, or T.S.D.B., which has about 400,000.

By contrast, fewer than 4,000 names from the T.S.D.B. are on the “no-fly” list, and an additional 14,000 on a “selectee” list that calls for mandatory secondary screening, an Obama administration official said.