It really is about that ridiculous.
There’s some good news today about a man I feel so close to that I almost feel like I know him in real life. I don’t, but I spent so much time researching his story that I almost feel like I do.
His name is Brandon Mayfield and this was a good week for him.
You can find hundreds of pages of stuff I’ve written about him before but this is a short summary of what happened to poor Mr. Mayfield and his family:
In March 2004, a group of people exploded a number of bombs in Madrid, Spain which killed and injured hundreds of innocent people. Recovered at the scene was a plastic bag with unexploded detonators. On that big was one partial fingerprint and one whole fingerprint.
The Spanish police searched their database(s) for a match to this fingerprint and did not find one. So they posted a digitized version on an international law enforcement website. The FBI (among others) began cranking this fingerprint through their own database (used to be called AFIS, I don’t know what it’s called now) for a match.
Fingerprint matching isn’t often an exact science. A forensic examination between someone’s finger and a recovered fingerprint analyzes the number of “points” where the two match. No two fingerprints left by the same exact person are ever exactly the same.
What the analyst does is see how similar the recovered fingerprint matches the finger of any specific individual. By examining the whorls and lines (and where the lines change direction – known as a “ridge” or “arch”) of an individual’s finger, the more the two samples match, the more certain the identification.
In different countries there are entirely different systems of classification as well. Certain characteristics (such as where and how many whorls there are) are commonly referred to as “points”. The more points that match, the more certain one can be that a specific individual is the one who left that specific fingerprint.
That being said, no two person’s fingerprints are the same. Therefore once you have a minimum number of “points” that match, you can be extremely certain that the specific fingerprints was left by the specific person.
Now, I told you all that to tell you that when the FBI cranked the Spanish police’s fingerprint through their (the FBI’s) database, no conclusive match was identified. Instead, a certain number of individuals with partial matches was identified. According to the WaPo, Mayfield’s fingerprints were on file because he had served in the military.
So X number of people were identified as partial matches. The intrepid FBI swung into action and began digging into all the potential matching people’s backgrounds. Out of them popped up Mr. Brandon Mayfield, an American citizen all his life who had gone to Egypt a number of years ago (about 20). While there he met an Egyptian woman, fell in love and married her. She was Muslim and Mayfield converted to her faith.
Furthermore, Mayfield was an attorney and had done some legal work for someone accused of terrorism near Mayfield’s home in Oregon. This individual was acquitted of all terrorism charges by the way.
Obviously a converted American Muslim with American citizenship who had some kind of legal dealings with an accused (but acquitted!) terrorist suspect was someone to investigate. I don’t deny the FBI was doing its job at this point.
The FBI swung into action, using all aspects of their new powers under the Patriot Act. They retrieved all of his business and bank records (without the companies involved able to inform Mayfield). The FBI then got a FISA warrant and entered his home when the Mayfield family was away. The FBI tapped his phones and read all his mail and recorded his internet surfing.
But there were two major problems with Mayfield as the suspect. To begin with, he had never been to Spain. He hadn’t even left the United States in years, so how could he have left his fingerprint on a bag in Spain?
The other problem was when the FBI informed the Spanish police that Mayfield was the individual who left the fingerprints on the bag of explosives. The Spanish police compared Mayfield’s prints to the recovered print (and not the lesser-qualitity digitized version the FBI used) and easily determined that Mayfield’s fingerprints did not match.
The Spanish police informed the FBI of this several times. Instead of believing them, the FBI sent agents on a plane to Spain to literally tell the Spanish police that they were wrong. Not only did they tell the Spanish they were wrong, the FBI literally said that they were one hundred percent certain that Mayfield was the culprit. Remember now, the Spanish people were angry and upset. They wanted to catch the guys responsible more than anyone. The last thing they would do is abandon a promising lead in this horrific case of terrorism.
To “prove” to the Spanish that they were wrong and the FBI was right, the FBI had Mayfield’s prints re-analyzed. The DOJ later did an investigation into what happened. Instead of hiring an independent analyst, the FBI essentially told the analyst to confirm that Mayfield had left the prints. The analyst only confirmed that Mayfield’s prints partially matched the recovered prints but that was good enough for the FBI.
Despite their utter certainty, the FBI did not arrest Mayfield. After bugging his home, entering it without his family’s knowledge (but leaving behind obvious and stupid evidence they had been in there), reading through his mail and all his records, they “made their move”. They seized Mayfield and detained him as a material witness. They did not charge him with a crime, in which case he would’ve been able to challenge his detention (habeas corpus). Instead, as a “material witness” to a terrorism case, the FBI could hold him (and question him) indefinitely, without Mayfield having access to a lawyer or a court.
The same thing happened to hundreds of Muslims in the United States, many of them non-citizens, some of them citizens, but none of them white. None of them with good ole white skin and red hair and a reputable job and an upstanding member of the community and a cute little daughter.
The FBI made no public announcement when they seized Mayfield. All the FBI did was cart away almost every piece of paper they could find in the house, including Mayfield’s elementary school aged daughter’s homework.
Mayfield’s wife was desperate to get her husband back. She tried to contact him or even find out where he was being detained, to no avail. Finally out of desperation, she (and Mayfield’s white American parents) appealed to the media. That was how the case surfaced in the public’s awareness.
The FBI responded the way they always do – by “trying” the case in the media. They mentioned his ominous conversion to Islam and his legal dealings with a “terrorist”. They also mentioned finding documents in Mayfield’s house written in Spanish. Of course those turned out to be nothing more than his daughter’s homework.
Despite the local outcry by the public, Mayfield would probably still be sitting in jail today if it weren’t for the fact that the Spanish police found the real person who left the fingerprints, an Algerian man. Remember again, the Spanish were the victims of this terrorist incident. This Algerian has not been arrested yet but there is a warrant out for his arrest. When he is captured he will be tried in a court of law like the other Madrid bombing suspects and given full access to his legal rights.
After Mayfield was reunited with his family, the FBI did an internal investigation into how they handled the case. About the only mistake they admitted to was being “too zealous” to believe Mayfield was a suspect based on the initial partial match, and that this colored all of their subsequent investigation, up to and including their second analysis of the fingerprints.
Two years later, this week, the Mayfield family got a nice chunk of change from the federal government as well as half an apology. I hope they enjoy every penny of it.
This case touched a nerve inside of me because of the old maxim, “there but for the grace of God go I“. If Mayfield hadn’t been white and born in America, he might still be out there in legal limbo. If the Spanish police hadn’t matched the fingerprint conclusively to someone else, he might still be in there.
And if the FBI’s zeal to solve a case this badly that occurred on foreign soil, you know they’re even more blind from eager lust at home. I literally shudder at the number of people’s rights they must have trampled in their quest to “bag” a real terrorist.
And as another saying goes, if it could happen to Mayfield, and Padilla, it could happen to you or to me. I’d rather be a Muslim convert with known ties to terrorism suspects in Spain than in the United States. Why? Because in Spain I could hire a lawyer, defend myself in front of a judge and prove my innocence.
The title of this diary obviously references the popular movie in theaters right now. With cases like Mayfield’s, this country’s justice system is more and more resembling Kazakhstan’s than it is the one described and enumerated in that tattered old document Bush twice took an oath to preserve and protect.
Pax
