Foreign Fighter Fingerprint Database Turns Up U.S. Arrest Records

FOXNews.com - Foreign Fighter Fingerprint Database Turns Up U.S. Arrest Records - Politics | Republican Party | Democratic Party | Political Spectrum: "Information coming in from fingerprinting around the globe is proving to be extremely beneficial to efforts in the War on Terror.

Officials have found that many of the foreign fighters and detainees they've fingerprinted have U.S. arrest records — many for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, and some of them very lengthy.

The Washington Post reports in Sunday editions that in the weeks and months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the FBI and U.S. military began coordinating the effort of fingerprinting fighters on the battlefield and others pulled in for questioning or detention.

An FBI team sent to Afghanistan in December 2001 interviewed foreign fighters and brought back fingerprint results to the bureau's criminal biometric database. The team found that for every 100 detainees fingerprinted, at least one came up with an arrest record in the U.S.

One of the men fingerprinted was Mohamed al Qahtani. At the time he was captured, he claimed he was in Afghanistan to learn the art of falconry. But when his fingerprints were traced, it turned out he'd been denied entry into Orlando International Airport in August 2001, just a month before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Sept. 11 commission later identified"