‘100 percent’ wrong

How the FBI’s arrest of suspected terrorist Brandon Mayfield unraveled

By Todd Murphy

The Portland Tribune, May 28, 2004, Updated Oct 30, 2009

By this past Monday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation seemed to consider its copy of the now-famous fingerprint Ñ a fingerprint found on a plastic bag linked to the deadly March 11 bombings of commuter trains in Madrid, Spain Ñ a worthless piece of junk.

Four FBI examiners “concurred that the latent fingerprint had multiple separations É that it was divided by many lines of demarcation possibly caused by creases in the underlying material, multiple touches by one or more fingers, or both,” according to court records. The FBI’s digital copy of the fingerprint was “of no value for identification purposes,” the examiners determined, according to the records.

What a difference a weekend can make.

Four days earlier Ñ and for a month before that Ñ the FBI considered the same digital copy of the fingerprint to be a “100 percent positive” match with Aloha lawyer Brandon Mayfield. That’s according to an FBI agent’s affidavit that led to Mayfield being arrested and detained in the Multnomah County jail for 14 days as a material witness to a terrorism investigation.

The fingerprint was an “absolutely incontrovertible match” to Mayfield, a “top U.S. counterterrorism official” told Newsweek magazine for its May 17 issue.

The FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office admitted their mistake about Mayfield and the fingerprint Monday. That was a few days after Spanish police said they had matched the fingerprint to an Algerian living in Spain, but more than a month after Spanish police first told the FBI that they did not believe Mayfield was a correct match.

The FBI admission got Mayfield, a convert to Muslim and father of three, out of jail and cleared of any suspicions. At the same time, it has set in motion a new round of searing criticism of the agency for how it is waging its war on terrorism.

The criticism ranges from how the FBI detains material witnesses such as Mayfield on sometimes scant or secret evidence to its competence in conducting the investigations to how, in the Mayfield case, FBI and federal officials apparently refused to heed Spanish concerns Ñ later proved right Ñ about the FBI’s fingerprint analysis.

“They’re under a lot of pressure to appear to be doing something, and they tend to grasp at straws, and I think that’s exactly what happened here,” Michael Greenberger, a former Justice Department official and the director of a counterterrorism think tank at the University of Maryland, said of the FBI. “They thought they had a trophy defendant here, that they could show the world that they’re on top of counterterrorism enforcement. And it blinds them to the realities of individual investigations.”

“I think it’s clear the government jumped the gun in this investigation,” said Neal Sonnett, a former federal prosecutor and the chair of the American Bar Association’s task force on the United States’ treatment of “enemy combatants.” “It evidences a desire on the part of the government, a feeling, that the government can shoot from the hip and worry about it later.”

Spanish doubts get a shrug

Until the very end, the FBI certainly seemed not too worried about disagreements with the Spanish police over its analysis matching Mayfield to the fingerprint. After Spanish police announced last week they had matched the fingerprint to the Algerian, Ouhnane Daoud, FBI representatives traveled to Madrid last weekend to look at the original fingerprint evidence Ñ to view “exactly what the Spanish National Police were looking at, as opposed to a digital image that had been sent overseas,” said Bob Jordan, FBI agent in charge of Oregon, at a news conference Monday.

After that visit, and after Jordan said the FBI realized its digital copy was of “substandard quality,” the bureau reversed itself, and Mayfield was cleared in the investigation.

But FBI fingerprint expertsalso traveled to Madrid on April 21, according to court records Ñ two weeks before Mayfield was arrested, but at a time when Spanish police already were stressing their doubt about the FBI’s match of Mayfield with the print. U.S. Attorney for Oregon Karin Immergut said it was her understanding that the FBI representatives did not at that time examine, or ask to examine, the fingerprint material the Spanish police had.

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