So says the FBI.
These terrorists are captured in Africa, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Iraq, etc. The crimes they committed in the U.S. range from drunken driving, passing bad checks, and traffic violations to immigration law violations, drug trafficking, and assault with a deadly weapon.
How do the feds know this? Fingerprinting.
The fingerprinting of detainees overseas began as ad-hoc FBI and U.S. military efforts shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It has since grown into a government-wide push to build the world's largest database of known or suspected terrorist fingerprints. The effort is being boosted by a presidential directive signed June 5, which gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond "known or suspected" terrorists.
Fingerprints are being beamed in via satellite from places as far-flung as the jungles of Zamboanga in the southern Philippines; Bogota, Colombia; Iraq; and Afghanistan. Other allies, such as Sweden, have contributed prints. The database can be queried by U.S. government agencies and by other countries through Interpol, the international police agency.
This data base can be used to track individuals, or groups of individuals all over the globe to link them together in a pattern of criminal behavior.
For example, a roadside bomb may explode and a patrol may fingerprint bystanders because insurgents have been known to remain at the scene to observe the results of their work. Prints also can be lifted off tiny fragments of exploded bombs, said military officials and contractors involved in the work.
Analysts are not just trying to identify the prints on the bomb. They want to find out who the bomb-carrier associates with. Who he calls. Who calls him. That could lead to the higher-level operatives who planned and financed attacks.
Already, fingerprints lifted off a bomb fragment have been linked to people trying to enter the United States, they said.
So who are these terrorists who had been in the U.S.; gotten arrested; then head out to kill and maim overseas?
Many of those with U.S. arrest records had come to the United States to study, said former Criminal Justice Information Services head Michael Kirkpatrick, who led the FBI effort to use biometrics in counterterrorism after Sept. 11. "It suggests there was some familiarity with Western culture, the United States specifically, and for whatever reason they did not agree with that culture," he said. "Either they became disaffected or put up with it, and then they went overseas."
What's odd is the civil libertarians raising a stink about all this FBI/Intepol biometric data base stuff. On one hand, many of these libertarians oppose GW's 'illegal war', and say all this terrorism crap should be treated as a law enforcement problem; but when the law enforcement agencies receive (~not take) the tools necessary to track & capture these terrorist rats, the FBI gets castigated for trampling on 'civil rights' and 'abuse of power'.
All I know is we must be doing something right. I blame George Bush.
