| Jagos |
05-26-2004 11:18 PM |
The FBI messes up...
Firstly, I'll link to the police tasering a 9 year old since both stories I'm talking about are related in the sense that the law authority shouldn't throw stones if it's not perfect:
http://www.fox11az.com/news/local/st...1f8073c21.html
Next, comes the story of the FBI, a fingerprint, a lawyer, and Spain being bad at copying...
Quote:
FBI used digital copy of print to finger wrong man in blasts
Brandon Mayfield, right, confers with his wife, Mona, in Portland, Ore., on Monday. A federal judge dismissed the case against him. (Don Ryan/The Associated Press)
The New York Times
PORTLAND, Ore. -- Days after the train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people in March, Spanish authorities, who were unable to find a match to fingerprints found on a plastic bag full of detonators, sent the FBI a digital copy, hoping the bureau could find what they could not.
The FBI quickly and confidently found a match to a Portland area-lawyer, setting in motion a chain of events that led authorities in the United States to link the wrong man to those fingerprints, tie him to Islamic terrorists, arrest him on a material witness warrant, jail him for 17 days and then drop the case on Monday and face withering questions about how its investigation could have gone so wrong.
Court records unsealed Tuesday showed that the Spanish authorities had raised questions about the FBI's fingerprint match to Brandon Mayfield, 37, a Portland-area lawyer. Yet FBI officials were so confident of a match they described as "100 percent," they never bothered to look at the original print while they were in Madrid on April 21 to meet with Spanish investigators.
The FBI was relying on the digital copy that was sent to them, returning to view the original over the weekend, only after the Spaniards had linked the print to an Algerian national, and after it had aggressively pursued its case against Mayfield.
A senior FBI official said Tuesday the use of a copy of the fingerprint, rather than the original, was allowed by lab guidelines. "It was absolutely acceptable to examine a digital image," the official said.
But the official said that the question of how and when copies should be used will be reviewed by the bureau in light of the Mayfield episode. "We'll be looking at the effect of the digital imaging on degradations, if there is any," the official said.
In making their case to a federal judge in Portland for arresting Mayfield, a Muslim convert, FBI investigators said their reasoning went beyond the fingerprint match, according to the affidavit: Mayfield had represented a terrorism defendant in a custody case, telephone 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, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, who is on a federal terrorism watch list. Earlier this year, federal agents searched the foundation, seizing financial records and other documents.
The Mayfields denied having any contact with Seda. The affidavit also said that Mayfield's law firm -- he runs a family and immigration law practice in Beaverton, Ore. -- 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. The yellow pages directory was administered by Jerusalem Enteprises Inc., which was registered to Farid Adlouni, a Portland resident whom the documents said was "directly linked in business dealings" with Wadih El-Hage, the former Bin Laden secretary who was convicted of conspiring to murder U.S. citizens. Finally, the affidavit said, Mayfield was seen driving to the Bilal mosque, his regular place of worship. That mosque, said officials with the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, had been under surveillance, but the FBI's mention of his attendance at the mosque as a justification for his arrest infuriated Muslim groups.
Thomas H. Nelson, a friend of Mayfield's who represented Mayfield before his case was turned over to Steven T. Wax, the federal defender for Oregon, said of the affidavit: "This stuff is so unsubstantial I think the only reason it was in there was to inflame the grand jury. "
But while Muslim groups attacked the FBI for its handling of the Mayfield case and accused it of ethnic profiling, bureau officials 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 Mayfield's background was," said an FBI official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "That had absolutely no role in any of this."
FBI officials said the error was the result of using a poor digital copy of the original fingerprint taken from a bag at the scene of the Madrid bombing. The FBI said Tuesday its lab in Quantico, Va., had begun look at its procedures in this case and others, and the official said that review would focus most closely on the propriety of using fingerprint copies. New guidelines may emerge from that review, and the FBI also plans to bring in outside experts to review the case.
Officials said it was difficult to assess the damage that the incident could do to the FBI and the reputation of its lab, which has come under fire for slipshod work in recent years. "We certainly take this very seriously, but that larger question of what impact this will have is a very difficult one. I don't think we can answer that," the official said.
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Discuss at your leisure. |
