In Sunday's Washington Post, staff writer Ellen Nakashima reveals some of the most interesting, post 9/11 information available regarding the FBI's efforts to collect biometrics on foreign fighters.

The article indicates that hundreds of "insurgents, detainees and ordinary people in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Horn of Africa," have had previous run-ins with U.S. law enforcement agencies. Many of these foreign nationals once called America home and had been arrested here for everything from drunk driving to felony assault charges. 

"In December 2001, an FBI team was sent on an unusual mission to Afghanistan. The U.S. military had launched a wave of airstrikes aimed at killing or capturing al Qaeda fighters and their Taliban hosts. The FBI team was to fingerprint and interview foreign fighters as if they were being booked at a police station.

The team, led by Paul Shannon, a veteran FBI agent embedded with U.S. special forces, traveled to the combat zone toting briefcases outfitted with printer's ink, hand rollers and paper cards. The agents worked in Kandahar and Kabul. They traversed the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. They hand-carried the fingerprint records from Afghanistan to Clarksburg, W.Va., home to the FBI's criminal biometric database.

As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI's database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said."

The FBI also fingerprints bystanders in roadside bomb attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan; insurgents apparently often remain at the scene of a crime. According to analysts at the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center, "fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment have been linked to people trying to enter the United States." 

And there's more: 

"In a separate data-sharing program, 365 Iraqis who have applied to the Department of Homeland Security for refugee status have been denied because their fingerprints turned up in the Defense Department's database of known or suspected terrorists."

Read the entire article here.  

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