Taming the Task of Checking for Terrorists' Names

By SARAH MILSTEIN

[...] Take, for instance, the name "Abd al-Rahman," which can be a given name or a surname, depending on its culture of origin. When transliterated from the Arabic into Latin characters, the name has three parts, the first two of which are prefixes for Rahman, meaning "slave of" or "servant of."

But when an English speaker hears the name, it tends to sound like "Abdurrahman." A person writing it down based simply on how it sounds could easily spell it as one word and in a way that shares few characters with the transliterated version. [...]

In all the condemnations of the INS, FBI, CIA and other agencies (including my own), this is a factor that has actually been somewhat overlooked.  I know I hadn't considered it at all until I read this article yesterday - and yet, in retrospect, I feel like I should.

Transliterating names from a non-English alphabet into our own letters is hardly an exact science.  I remember how, during the years when Kaddaffi was in the news on a regular basis, I found it confusing to see his name written in such a wide variety of ways.  Sometimes the first sound was written as a K, Kh, Q, Qu, G, or Gh, and whether the "d" sound in the middle and the "f" sound at the end were represented by single letters, double letters or one of each led to an abundence of spellings -- none of which could be considered "official" or "correct".  The article also notes that there are over 200 ways that "Mohammad" can be spelled in English.

Now, none of this excuses the vast majority of the lapses that we've seen from our security and law enforcement agencies.  By and large, they have failed us in far too many ways.  This issue, however, does help explain at least where some problems may originate.  Much of our intel is dependent on watch lists, and if the names are spelled one way on the watch list and a different way the passports or visas - especially if the difference is as great as the example quoted above ("Abd al-Rahman" vs "Abdurrahman") - it may be somewhat more understandable when someone slips through the cracks.