The biometrics data has also been shared with the FBI and military researchers say there are plans to extend the collection process to Iraq in the event of a U.S. invasion.
Since January, military and intelligence operatives have used a U.S. Army biometric tool kit to create the dossiers of prisoners in Afghanistan and at the U.S. base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In doing so they have taken biometrics well beyond its most common use to date -- identity verification for restricting access to computers or secure areas.
"We're trying to collect every biometric on every bad guy that we can," said Lt. Col. Kathy De Bolt, deputy director of the U.S. Army battle lab at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., where the tools were developed.
"Any place we go into -- Iraq or wherever -- we're going to start building a dossier on people of interest to intelligence," De Bolt said. "Even if they get released, we have face and voice clips. When they come into one of our checkpoints, we can say 'You're this bad guy from here."'
The system, known as the Biometrics Automated Toolset, or BAT, consists of about 50 laptop computers equipped with scanners that collect biometrics. The laptop field units store suspects' information in a central database at a U.S. intelligence agency -- De Bolt declined to say which one -- in the Washington area.
An additional 400 laptops are being prepared for a possible Iraq invasion, said Anthony Iasso, a software engineer at Northrop Grumman Corp. who leads the project at Fort Huachuca.
So far, BAT data has been shared with both the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to help them check the identities of incoming foreigners and of foreigners arrested inside the United States, officials said. Federal law prohibits military or intelligence agents from collecting data on U.S. citizens.
Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Davis confirmed that the military collects biometrics data on terror suspects but would not offer details.
"Obviously, we're doing such things so we know who they are if they're released and we encounter them again," he said.
U.S. military officials at Guantanamo Bay, from which four detainees were released over the weekend, would not verify whether the system was in use. Nor would officials at U.S. Special Forces Command or Central Command, which oversees operations in Afghanistan.
But a U.S. immigration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the INS has added the biometric intelligence data to the system it uses to check fingerprints of suspicious persons at hundreds of locations, including all U.S. entry points, Border Patrol stations and INS field offices.
"Anytime anyone is taken into custody for investigation by INS, they're checked against this system," said the official. He would not say whether the data has led to any arrests.
De Bolt and Iasso said the BAT system aims to track global movements of terrorists. If a person catalogued and released in Afghanistan later turns up at a checkpoint in the Philippines -- perhaps using a different identity -- officials might begin investigating the suspect's background and links to others, De Bolt said.
The suspect doesn't have to be apprehended, fingerprinted or even identified by name, Iasso said.
U.S. authorities are already adding surveillance photos and fingerprints gathered from, say, drinking glasses or magazine covers found in known terrorist haunts. INS or military officials can query the database with a single photo or fingerprint, officials said.
Besides biometrics, a suspect's dossier might contain text from prisoner interrogations, video or sound clips and digital images of scanned items seized during a search, Iasso said.
The system is designed to surmount secrecy hurdles that can prevent intelligence agencies from sharing information with police or border officials. So while security clearances are required to see terror suspects' files, the system allows simple searches to determine whether a person is a suspect without divulging sensitive intelligence.
If a prisoner's thumbprint produces a match, the system might simply reply "call CIA," De Bolt said.
The database, which resides on a computer cluster with a terabyte -- a trillion bytes -- of storage, also allows soldiers to search it via satellite telephone from a battlefield, De Bolt said.
In the Balkans, biometrics on more than 10,500 foreign employees at U.S. military camps Bondsteel and Montieth in Kosovo and Camp Able Sentry in Macedonia are stored in a BAT database, Iasso said.
If a foreign worker on a U.S. base is fired, the data ensure the person can't assume a new identity and be rehired at another U.S. base.
In May, a bill was introduced in the Senate that would require the Director of Central Intelligence to create a database of known or suspected terrorists, and share it with federal, state, local and foreign governments.
Although the Senate measure makes no mention of biometrics, De Bolt said BAT data could find its way into such a system.
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