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--- Begin Message --- -Caveat Lector-Spanish documents or Spanish homework?
Friday, June 11, 2004David SarasohnWhen FBI agents went through Brandon Mayfield's possessions to investigate his connection with the Madrid train bombings, they came upon and took what they called "miscellaneous Spanish documents."
The New York Times reported that Mayfield's family later identified the documents as his children's Spanish homework.
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Now that Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer, has been released after two weeks in federal prison as a "material witness," now that the FBI has formally apologized to him, it seems he should just drop out of sight, a footnote to the war on terror.
But reporting keeps coming up with curious discoveries about weaknesses, from the beginning, in the FBI's connection of Mayfield to the case -- weaknesses that arose before Mayfield was ever arrested.
The connection began March 16, when Spanish police sent U.S. officials copies of fingerprints from a bag containing detonators, found near the bombings five days before. The FBI concluded that the match with a fingerprint of Mayfield -- on file from his eight years in the military and a youthful arrest -- was "100 percent." The FBI notified the Spanish of thhe match.
But by April 13, according to the Times, the Spanish told the FBI that the match was "conclusively negative." In a meeting with the FBI in Spain April 21, Spanish officials insisted that there was no match, while FBI agents insisted there was -- but never asked to see the actual bag.
By then, the FBI had found that Mayfield was a Muslim convert, that he was often seen driving to the Bilal mosque in Beaverton, Ore., that he had represented, in a child custody suit, one of the Portland Seven convicted terrorists.
It's understandable that these discoveries -- or the fingerprint match itself -- would set off alarms. The question is whether the discoveries about Mayfield himself beggan to overwhelm the weaknesses the Spanish kept noting in the fingerprint match.
The claim of probable cause, says federal public defender Steven Wax, was based on "some sort of guilt by association with people who may have had contacts with other people the government had concerns about."
And then Mayfield's possession of "miscellaneous Spanish documents."
Tuesday, before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General John Ashcroft expressed regret on the arrest, explaining, "When we learned that the reservations of the Spanish were so substantial, we went to the court, asked for the release of Mr. Mayfield."
But Mayfield was arrested May 6, after the Spanish had rejected the match April 13, and again April 21. He wasn't released until May 20, when the Spanish said they'd matched the fingerprint to someone else.
With the fingerprint evidence abandoned -- a Scotland Yard fingerprint expert hired by the defense told the Seattle Times the claim of a match was "horrendous" -- twoo things stand out about Mayfield: One, that he was Muslim and associated with various other Muslims. Two, that considering the powers currently claimed by the federal government, he was lucky.
"But for the fact that he had access to counsel and judicial review, Mr. Mayfield might still be in jail today," Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., told Ashcroft in Tuesday's hearing. "Held as an enemy combatant, Mr. Mayfield would be in a military jail without the right to an attorney. And his truthful statements of innocence would be taken simply as failure of his interrogators."
He might be lucky in another way. Imagine the trouble he could be in if his kids were studying French.
. . . . . . .
David Sarasohn is an associate editor at The Oregonian of Portland, Ore. He can be contacted at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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