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As Published: Mayfield case shows deceit by government

As edited and published by the Observer-Reporter:

Mayfield case shows deceit by government

Friday, June 11, 2004

The recent Brandon Mayfield incident in Portland explicitly exposes the FBI and the Department of Justice for the pack of liars they are. We are expected to believe that after a search of their fingerprint databases, which contain millions of fingerprints, Mayfield's fingerprint just happened to be the one which three FBI 'expert' examiners and a court-appointed examiner considered to be a '100 percent identification' and a match? Even though Spanish authorities almost immediately cast doubt on that judgment, the Justice Department sought Mayfield's detention anyway, based on the FBI's insistence that it had identified the right man.

What a coincidence that Mayfield, a lawyer who practices immigration and family law, also:

Is an American citizen who converted to Islam and married and Egyptian;

Is a member of and was seen driving from his home to the Bilal mosque, his place of worship;

Had represented a man in a custody dispute who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to help Al Qaida fight American forces in Afghanistan;

Placed ads for his law firm in a 'Muslim yellow page directory,' which was administered by 'Jerusalem Enterprises, Inc.' and registered to Farid Adlouni, a Portland resident who had business dealings with Osama bin Laden's former personal secretary, Wadih El Hage, who was convicted by a New York federal court of conspiring to murder U.S. citizens;

Was connected to an alleged 'telephonic contact' on Sept. 11, 2002, placed between his home and a phone number assigned to Pete Seda, director of a local Islamic charity, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, who is on a federal terrorism watch list.

The U.S. attorney in Portland insists that religion had nothing to do with the investigation because Mayfield was not under suspicion when the FBI first analyzed the prints. It was the fingerprint match alone that led the FBI to him.

After Mayfield's release on May 20, two FBI examiners traveled to Madrid to investigate the prints again. This time, they concluded that the latent print originally linked to Mayfield was "of no value for identification purposes."

Bureau officials have said his status as a Muslim had nothing to do with the case against him, and the people in the lab looking at the fingerprint had no idea what Mayfield's background was.

The lab people may not have known his background, but others in the bureau certainly did. I believe they wanted to have a closer look at Mayfield and jumped at the chance to use a bogus fingerprint identification to obtain the warrants allowing searches and Mayfield's detention as a material witness.

It is time we true Americans, the ones who really understand why this country is great, stop accepting the lies that our federal government, and particularly this administration, dish out in the name of fighting terrorism. Mayfield said it best: "You can't trade your freedom for security, because if you do, you're going to lose both."

Bill Dawson

Washington

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A Somewhat Gentler Statement, as Submitted to the Local Newspaper

Friday, May 28, 2004

Just what are the odds (that the FBI is telling the truth)?
The recent Brandon Mayfield incident in Portland explicitly exposes the FBI and the DOJ for the pack of deceitful liars they are. We are expected to believe that after a search of their fingerprint databases, which contain millions of fingerprints, Mr. Mayfield's fingerprint just happened to be the one which three FBI so-called "expert" examiners and a court-appointed examiner considered to be a "100 percent identification" and a match? Even though Spanish authorities almost immediately cast doubt on that judgment, the Justice Department sought Mr. Mayfield's detention anyway, based on the FBI's insistence that it had identified the right man. What a coincidence that Mr. Mayfield, a lawyer who practices immigration and family law, also:

Is an American citizen who converted to Islam and married and Egyptian in 1989

Is is a member of and was seen driving from his home to the Bilal mosque, his regular place of worship

Had represented a man in a custody dispute who later pleaded guilty to conspiring to help Al Qaeda fight American forces in Afghanistan

Placed ads for his law firm in a "Muslim yellow page directory," which was administered by "Jerusalem Enterprises, Inc.," and registered to Farid Adlouni, a Portland resident who had business dealings with Osama bin Laden's former personal secretary, Wadih El Hage, who was convicted by a New York federal court of conspiring to murder U.S. citizens

Was connected to an alleged "telephonic contact" on September 11, 2002, placed between his home and a phone number assigned to Pete Seda, the director of a local Islamic Charity, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, who is on a federal terrorism watch list.

The United States attorney in Portland insists that religion had nothing to do with the investigation because Mr. Mayfield was not under suspicion when the FBI first analyzed the prints. It was the fingerprint match alone that led the FBI to Mr. Mayfield, prosecutors have asserted. Mr. Mayfield "was not under investigation and federal law enforcement authorities had no reason to believe that Mayfield had any information about the Madrid bombings."

FBI officials seemed so confidant of the "100 percent" match that they never bothered to look at the original print while in Madrid on April 21 to meet with Spanish investigators. This meeting was necessary after "it became apparent that the preliminary findings of the forensic science division of the Spanish National Police concluded that the fingerprints were not consistent with those of the FBI laboratory", according to an affidavit used to support Mayfield's arrest. However, at the end of the Madrid meeting, FBI officials concluded, the Spaniards "felt satisfied" with the FBI's analysis.

After Mr. Mayfield's release on May 20, two FBI examiners traveled to Madrid to investigate the prints again. This time, after the agents returned, they concluded that the latent print originally linked to Mr. Mayfield was "of no value for identification purposes," and it withdrew its finding of a match.

Bureau officials have said that his status as a Muslim had nothing to do with the case against him. "The people in the lab looking at the fingerprint had no idea what Mr. Mayfield's background was," said an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "That had absolutely no role in any of this."

The lab people may not have known Mr. Mayfield's background, but others in the bureau certainly did. I believe they wanted to have a "closer look" at Mr. Mayfield and jumped at the chance to use a bogus fingerprint identification to obtain the warrants allowing covert and overt searches and Mr. Mayfield's detention as a material witness. Mr. Mayfield was surely a "person of interest" to the FBI well before the Madrid bombings, and would have been high on the FBI's list of "persons to really investigate the first chance we get to have an excuse or plausible deniability".

It is time we true American's, the ones who really understand why this country is great, stop accepting the acts, lies and deceit that our Federal Government, and particularly this administration, dish out in the name of "fighting terrorism". Mr. Mayfield has said it best, "You can't trade your freedom for security, because if you do, you're going to lose both."

Bill Dawson

Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security suckers the CIA into disclosing that Iranian code had been broken!

Immediately after the news broke on this issue I knew that what was being reported was not the truth. The evident truth is now just starting to come out and will eventually disclose the CIA as the disfunctional bungling bureaucratic Tower of Babble into which it has evolved. Could this latest fiasco be the real reason George Tenent resigned? How many more lives must be sacrificed before this altar of gross ineptitude before base changes occur within this critically disfunctional agency?

Government officials say they started the investigation of Pentagon officials after learning that Mr. Chalabi had told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's intelligence service that the United States was reading their communications. Mr. Chalabi, American officials say, gave the information to the Iranians about six weeks ago, apparently because he wanted to ensure that his secret conversations with the Iranians were not revealed to the Americans.

But the Iranian official apparently did not immediately believe Mr. Chalabi, because he sent a cable back to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, American officials said. That cable was intercepted and read by the United States, the officials said.

Mr. Chalabi and his supporters argue that the accusations against him are part of a C.I.A.-inspired campaign to discredit him. His backers have been dismayed that the Bush administration recently divorced itself from Mr. Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress. They contend that the move was instigated by the C.I.A., which they say is now wielding intercepted Iranian communications as a weapon against Mr. Chalabi.

Richard N. Perle, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board and an influential Chalabi supporter, said Wednesday that the notion that Mr. Chalabi would compromise the American code-breaking operation "doesn't pass the laugh test." Mr. Perle said it was more plausible that the Iranians, knowing already that the United States was reading its communications, planted the damning information about Mr. Chalabi to persuade Washington to distance itself from Mr. Chalabi.

"The whole thing hinges on the idea that the Baghdad station chief of the MOIS commits one of the most amazing trade craft errors I've ever heard of," Mr. Perle said, referring to Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security. He said it defied belief that a seasoned intelligence operative would disclose a conversation with Mr. Chalabi using the same communications channel that he had just been warned was compromised.

"You have to believe that the station chief blew a gift from the gods because of rank incompetence," Mr. Perle said. "I don't believe it, and I don't think any other serious intelligence professional would either."

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The FBI Continues to Spew Lies, Lies, and More Lies in the Mayfield Debacle

It's a crime to lie to the FBI, but the FBI can lie to the world with impunity. See my previous posting on this issue, then read the following.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

June 5, 2004
Spain and U.S. at Odds on Mistaken Terror Arrest
By SARAH KERSHAW

This article was reported by Sarah Kershaw, Eric Lichtblau, Dale Fuchs and Lowell Bergman, and was written by Ms. Kershaw.

PORTLAND, Ore., June 3 — Two weeks after United States authorities cleared a Portland-area lawyer of any connection to the deadly terrorist bombing in Madrid, high-level Spanish law enforcement officials who were also involved in the investigation are challenging key aspects of the United States' version of events in the case, touching off a muddy dispute between the two allies and painting a portrait of F.B.I. officials who repeatedly rejected evidence that they had the wrong man.

Much of the disagreement between the two countries continues to center on the fingerprints lifted from a blue plastic bag discovered near the scene of the March 11 bombing, which killed 191 people and left 2,000 injured in the deadliest terrorist attack in Europe since World War II. F.B.I. officials once maintained the prints matched those of the American lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, who was jailed for two weeks, and the F.B.I. at one point told federal prosecutors that Spanish officials were "satisfied" with their conclusion.

But in interviews this week, Spanish officials vehemently denied ever backing up that assessment, saying they had told American law enforcement officials from the start, after their own tests, that the match was negative. The Spanish officials said their American counterparts relentlessly pressed their case anyway, explaining away stark proof of a flawed link — including what the Spanish described as tell-tale forensic signs — and seemingly refusing to accept the notion that they were mistaken.

"They had a justification for everything," said Pedro Luis Melida Lledo, head of the fingerprint unit for the Spanish National Police, whose team analyzed the prints in question and met with the Americans on April 21. "But I just couldn't see it."

The Spaniards, who continued to examine the fingerprints, eventually made their own match, to an Algerian citizen, whom they then arrested.

Carlos Corrales, a commissioner of the Spanish National Police's science division, said he was also struck by the F.B.I.'s intense focus on Mr. Mayfield. "It seemed as though they had something against him," Mr. Corrales said, "and they wanted to involve us."

A senior F.B.I. official, in an interview this week, sought to smooth over differences with the Spanish and said that the United States was solely to blame for the faulty match. "The Spanish did not cause the misidentification to occur," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It was squarely on the shoulders of the F.B.I."

He also denied that there were any tensions between his office and Madrid, or that American officials had applied any pressure on the Spanish to concur with their finding about the Mayfield match. The only purpose in going to Spain for the April 21 meeting was to explain the process the F.B.I. used in matching the print, and "to explain our conclusions," he said.

His comments were in stark contrast to those made only last week by senior F.B.I. officials during several closed-door briefings for Congressional staff members looking into how the mistakes could have happened. There, according to several Congressional aides who attended, officials strongly suggested that the Spanish authorities were partly responsible for the fingerprint fiasco and signaled that relations with them were strained.

"It's really coming down to a `he said, he said,' " said one aide who attended a briefing. "They said over and over again that `we asked the Spanish for the best possible evidence.' The clear impression was they asked the Spanish for all this, and they didn't give it to them."

An examination of court records and transcripts as well as interviews with Spanish and United States law enforcement officials and with Mr. Mayfield and his lawyers reveals that the twists and turns of the case go far deeper than problems of diplomacy. In pursuing what proved to be a flawed case against Mr. Mayfield, the F.B.I. was also beset by internal dissension between officials in Portland and Washington, a language barrier with the Spanish, and a fingerprint examination that the bureau now concedes was flawed from the start.

The result was what William Baker, former assistant director of the F.B.I., describes as "a major black eye" comparable to the wrongful arrest of Richard Jewell in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombings. The F.B.I. "can't afford too many more of these," Mr. Baker said. "You start losing your credibility, and then judges start losing their confidence."

As far as who is right in the dispute, "clearly Spain holds the high card here," Mr. Baker said.

Amid all of the turmoil was the frightening experience of a bewildered lawyer from Portland, who grew more and more panicked that his fate was being sealed and there was nothing he could do about it. "That's not my fingerprint, your honor," a baffled Mr. Mayfield said at one point to the judge during a hearing after his arrest, pleading not to be taken to jail. "I have never seen this bag. I have no awareness about that bag."

The bizarre tale began days after the attack, when the F.B.I., after receiving several fingerprint images from Spain, said it had found a match to the digital image of a print from the blue bag, which held seven copper detonators like those used on the train bombs. Mr. Mayfield's prints were in the F.B.I.'s central database of more than 44 million prints because they had been taken when he joined the military, where he served for eight years before being honorably discharged as a second lieutenant.

The F.B.I. officials concluded around March 20 that it was a "100 percent match," to Mr. Mayfield, according to court records and prosecutors in Portland. They informed their Spanish counterparts on April 2 and included Mr. Mayfield's prints in a letter to them.

But after conducting their own tests, Spanish law enforcement officials said they reported back to the F.B.I. in an April 13 memo that the match was "conclusively negative." Yet for for five weeks, F.B.I. officials insisted their analysis was correct.

In Portland, meanwhile, investigators were quickly building their case against Mr. Mayfield, 37, a Muslim convert, and arrested him on May 6 on a material witness warrant, a technique that civil liberties advocates charge that the Bush administration has abused in an effort to fight terrorism. Despite never being charged with an actual crime, court transcripts and interviews with Mr. Mayfield show he was told that he was being investigated in connection with crimes punishable by death and jailed for 14 days. On May 24, after the Spaniards had linked that same print from the plastic bag to the Algerian national, Mr. Mayfield's case was thrown out. The F.B.I. issued him a highly unusual official apology, and his ordeal became a stunning embarrassment to the United States government.

In interviews this week, Mr. Corrales, Mr. Melida and other Spanish law enforcement officials suggested that the entire episode could have been avoided. Mr. Melida was among 10 Spanish police officials who met on April 21 in Madrid with a fingerprint examiner from the F.B.I. lab at Quantico, Va., — one of three F.B.I. examiners who confirmed the Mayfield match — and other American officials to discuss their differing views on the fingerprint.

Mr. Baker said the F.B.I. may have erred by sending examiners to Spain to try to iron out wrinkles in the case in April and May, rather than sending higher-level officials to signal that the case was a high priority for the United States. The F.B.I. official who spoke on condition of anonymity said the examiner who met with the Spaniards was one of the F.B.I.'s best forensics people, but he acknowledged that the examiner did not speak Spanish. Other Americans at the meeting did, however.

At the meeting, the F.B.I. presented the Spanish with a three-page document detailing their findings, according to Mr. Melida.

F.B.I. officials told Congressional members in the briefings last week that they came up with the match after working off a "second-generation" digital print — meaning a copy of a copy. But they gave a somewhat different explanation in interviews this week, saying they are now uncertain what generation the digital print represented. But the F.B.I. official who spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity added that the real issue was the quality of the latent print that the Spanish originally took from the blue bag.

The determination by an F.B.I. examiner that the print was useable was hasty and erroneous, the official said, and set the agency off in the wrong direction and corrupted the rest of the process. (In an article on May 8 in The Times, one Spanish official erroneously said that authorities there thought the prints matched.)

At the April 21 meeting, the F.B.I. presented the Spanish with a three-page document detailing their position that the prints from the bag belonged to Mr. Mayfield, according to Mr. Melida, the head of the fingerprint unit for the Spanish National Police, whose team analyzed the prints in question. The Spanish law enforcement officials kept pointing out discrepancies between their analysis and that of the F.B.I., but this did not seem to sink in with the Americans, Mr. Melida said.

The Spaniards had said the two prints had seven points, or specific aspects, in common, while the Americans insisted the prints had 15. F.B.I. officials would not discuss the discrepancies.

Mr. Melida said an examination of the two prints showed that the arcs on the lower part of the print curved downward in Mr. Mayfield's print but upward in the print from the bag. In addition, the two prints did not have the same number of concentric rings, or crests, he said. "You're trying to match a woman's face to a picture," he said. But you see that woman has a mole, and the face in the picture doesn't. Well, maybe it's covered up with make-up, you say. O.K., but the woman has straight hair and it's curly in the picture. Maybe the woman in the picture had a permanent?"

The F.B.I., who up until then had seen only a copy of the print, had an opportunity at the April 21 meeting to examine the plastic bag, but did not ask to do so, Mr. Melida said. The F.B.I. official who spoke to The Times refused to say why the agency did not ask the Spanish for access to the original prints or a higher-quality image during that meeting. They waited until a month later, after the F.B.I. received word of the match to the Algerian, to ask to see the bag. But it was too late. By then, the original prints on the bag had been destroyed through testing and examination, according to both Spanish and American authorities.

At the end of the meeting, Mr. Melida said, the Spaniards said they would continue to study the fingerprint matter, but they "refused to validate" the F.B.I.'s conclusions and maintained that the match was negative.

Asked about Spain's determination that the Mayfield match was a negative, the F.B.I. official told The Times: "We didn't know what it meant." F.B.I. officials were uncertain how or why the Spanish had come to that conclusion, and the F.B.I. was confident of its own findings, he said.

And so on May 6, in an affidavit in support of Mr. Mayfield's arrest warrant, Portland prosecutors, who had been briefed by the F.B.I. on the Madrid meeting, stated that the Spaniards would continue to analyze the prints but that they "felt satisfied" with the F.B.I.'s conclusions.

The United States attorney in Portland, Karin J. Immergut, said in an interview that she was concerned about the questions raised by Spanish authorities. But she said F.B.I. officials assured her that the analysis conducted at the lab in Quantico was accurate and that any doubts raised by the Spaniards had been resolved.

"In terms of the doubts," Ms. Immergut said, "the issue was raised by the Spanish but it was quickly dispelled."

Her office had been investigating Mr. Mayfield since March 20, when the F.B.I. notified Portland prosecutors of the fingerprint match. Building their case for his arrest on a material witness warrant, they came up with a list of Mr. Mayfield's potential ties to Muslim terrorists, which they included in the affidavit they presented to the federal judge who ordered his arrest and detention.

They included that Mr. Mayfield had represented a Portland terrorism defendant in a custody case; that records showed a "telephonic contact" on Sept. 11, 2002, between his home and a phone number assigned to Pete Seda, the director of a local Islamic charity, who is on a federal terrorism watch list; that his law firm was advertised in a "Muslim yellow page directory," which was produced by a man who had business dealings with Osama bin Laden's former personal secretary; and that he was seen driving from his home to the Bilal mosque, his regular place of worship.

The document also said while no travel records were found for Mr. Mayfield, "It is believed that Mayfield may have traveled under a false or fictitious name."

Mr. Mayfield had never been to Spain, he said, and the last time he was out of the country was more than 10 years ago, when he was posted in Germany with the Army and, separately, visited Egypt, his wife's native country. He said he had left Portland only twice in the last few years, once to take his children to a theme park in Las Vegas and once to see brother, who was dying of leukemia, in Kansas.

"Being a sole practitioner, it's hard to stay afloat and it's not like I had time to be traipsing around the world," he said in an interview. "If they only knew."

Meanwhile, an F.B.I. official said that Robert Jordan, the F.B.I. special agent in charge in Portland, was upset by the F.B.I. headquarter's handling of the case and that Mr. Jordan had been kept out of the loop in key decision making matters, particularly after the case fell apart. When Mr. Jordan called officials in Washington the day the case was thrown out, the official said, he left a message but was excluded from high-level conversations about the mistake.

Spanish officials said they were not more assertive with the F.B.I. because they did not want to openly contradict their close ally in the war on terror, although they continued privately to express their doubts.

"The Spanish officers told them with all the affection in the world that it wasn't him," said a Spanish police official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We never wanted to simply come out and say the F.B.I. made a mistake. We tried to be diplomatic, not to make them look bad, so we just said the case is still open."

Between the April 21 meeting and May 11, six days after Mr. Mayfield's arrest, the F.B.I. "called us constantly," Mr. Corrales said. They kept pressing us."

On May 6, Mr. Mayfield heard a curious knock on the door of his law office, on the first floor of a beige office building in Beaverton, a Portland suburb. It was about 10 in the morning and Mr. Mayfield, who had opened his still-fledgling solo immigration and family law practice a few years ago, was not expecting anyone.

At the door were two agents with the F.B.I., a pair Mr. Mayfield described in an interview as "good cop, bad cop," "tall one, short one," a burly male agent and a diminutive female agent. Reading from a list on the search warrant, which was contained in court records unsealed last week, the agents told Mr. Mayfield they were searching for, among other things, "explosives, blasting agents and detonators."

The court records show that the agents confiscated a large number of items from the office, including computer disks, bank statements, yellow Post-it Notes and confidential client files. Meanwhile, agents were confiscating things from the Mayfield's home, including a .22-caliber handgun and .22-caliber rifle, his Koran, and what was described in the search warrant return report as "miscellaneous Spanish documents," which turned out to be Spanish homework belonging to Mr. Mayfield's children, family members said.

In the office that morning, Mr. Mayfield, not yet understanding the gravity of the situation, was almost dismissive of the agents. He recalled telling the agents, "If you have questions, put them in writing, I'll review them and I might get back to you."

This did not go over well, Mr. Mayfield recalled, and soon enough, he was frisked and handcuffed and marched out to a Ford Explorer that would take him to the federal courthouse in downtown Portland. On the way to the courthouse, one of the agents, "the bad cop," said something that Mr. Mayfield found particularly scary, he recalled.

"Brandon think long and hard," he quoted the agent as telling him. "You remember how the Muslim brothers stood up for Mike Hawash," one of the Muslim defendants in the terrorism case here known as the "Portland Seven," who pleaded guilty to last year to a charge of aiding the Taliban. "Well, they are not going to be there for you."

F.B.I. officials in Portland, including Mr. Jordan, declined to be interviewed about the case. Many Muslim leaders say they suspect the F.B.I. zeroed in on Mr. Mayfield because he was a Muslim who had connections to the Portland Seven and who visited a mosque that was under suspicion. But F.B.I. officials emphasized that the examiners who made the initial match between the Madrid print and Mr. Mayfield did not know his name, much less his religion.

They said that all they had was the print. The faulty match was another setback for the F.B.I. laboratory, which is considered by many to be the premier forensic crime laboratory in the country. But both the F.B.I. laboratory and the fingerprinting technique have endured stinging criticism in recent years.

Critics say the F.B.I. has resisted using uniform standards for fingerprint identification. F.B.I. officials say that human experience — rather than rigid and somewhat artificial indicators — is the best way to determine a fingerprint match, but critics say the F.B.I. should insist that its examiners establish a set number of points of similarity on a print before they can declare a match.

A Senate aide who also attended a Congressional briefing said there was great concern about the impact the Mayfield mistake would have. "This is going to kill prosecutors for years every time they introduce a fingerprint ID by the F.B.I.," the aide said. "The defense will be saying `is this a 100 percent match like the Mayfield case?' "

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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