Fingerprints and the War on Terror: An FBI Perspective

Abstract : In late 2001, with the Tora Bora bombing campaign in Afghanistan in full swing, a team from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) entered the combat theater on an unprecedented mission: to fingerprint, photograph, and interview captured terrorists as if they were bank robbers. The idea of this mission was to freeze the identities of terrorists through a traditional law enforcement booking procedure used for decades by police officers in the United States to track dangerous criminals so the terrorists could always be identified as such. There was urgency to this FBI mission. Afghanistan in 2001 was clearly the launching pad for the attacks of September 11.