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FBI pays $2 million to US Muslim in terror-suspect case
Agency denies charges of religious targeting. Settlement allows challenge to the Patriot Act.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has agreed to pay Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield $2 million as part of a settlement for wrongfully arresting him in connection with the 2004 Madrid terror attacks.
The New York Times reports that the FBI also apologized for its actions and agreed to destroy all materials collected during its electronic surveillance of Mr. Mayfield and secret searches of his home and office. Mayfield is also allowed to continue his lawsuit that challenges the constitutionality of the Patriot Act. He charges that the antiterrorism law violates the Fourth Amendment because is allows for government searches without first establishing "probable cause" of a crime.
Mayfield, an American-born convert to Islam, was put under government surveillance after the FBI mistakenly linked him to the March bombings. He was arrested in May 2004 and held for two weeks as a terrorist suspect, despite evidence from the Spanish government that he was not connected to the attack.
"The horrific pain, torture and humiliation that this has caused myself and my family is hard to put into words," said Mr. Mayfield, an American-born convert to Islam and a former lieutenant in the Army.
"The days, weeks and months following my arrest," he said, "were some of the darkest we have had to endure. I personally was subject to lockdown, strip searches, sleep deprivation, unsanitary living conditions, shackles and chains, threats, physical pain and humiliation."
The Washington Post reports that the apology was "unusual" for the FBI, and that the payment (more than twice what the government paid to Wen Ho Lee, a US nuclear scientist who said officials violated his privacy rights) is a "clear embarrassment."
FBI examiners had erroneously linked him to a partial fingerprint on a bag of detonators found after terrorists bombed commuter trains in Madrid in March, killing 191 people. The bureau compounded its error by stridently resisting the conclusions of the Spanish National Police, which notified the FBI three weeks before Mayfield was arrested that the fingerprint did not belong to him.
Mayfield's lawsuit alleged that his civil rights had been violated and that he was arrested because he is a Muslim convert who had represented some defendants in terrorism-related cases.
The Los Angeles Times reports that Spanish authorities, who were dubious from the start that the prints were Mayfield's, eventually identified them as belonging to an Algerian. Experts say the case highlights the "error potential" for fingerprint matching, which they say is too high.
"This is a tip-of-the-iceberg phenomenon," said Simon A. Cole, a professor of criminology, law and society at UC Irvine and author of 'Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification.' The argument has always been that no two people have fingerprints exactly alike ... But that's not what you need to have an error. What you need is for two people to have very similar fingerprints, and that's what happened here."
Michael Cherry, president of Cherry Biometrics, an identification-technology company, said misidentification problems could grow worse as the US and other governments add more fingerprints to their databases.
"I really believe there are a lot more Mayfields out there," Cherry said. "We just don't know about these cases because the Spanish police don't always get to oversee them. We simply don't have an identification standard that fits with today's times."
The Times also writes that a report on the Mayfield case, released last January by Glenn Fine of the Office of the Inspector General (the Justice Department's internal watchdog), said the bureau overlooked important differences between Mayfield's and the Algerian's prints. The report also said the FBI basically ignored the Spanish police when they said they had the wrong man.
McClatchy reports that Mr. Fine also said the case did not entail government abuse of the new powers it acquired as a result of the Patriot Act, as the FBI did not use those powers in survelliance of Mayfield. Fine also said that Mayfield's religion wasn't the "sole" reason for his arrested, but contributed to the failure "to sufficiently reconsider the identification after legitimate questions about it were raised."
The Associated Press reports, however, that in a separate statement released Wednesday, Mayfield said his religion was one of the main reasons that he was targeted by the FBI.
"Not only does my detention as a material witness in the Madrid bombing underscore the fallacy that fingerprint identification is reliable, I hope the public will remember that the US Government also targeted me and my family because of our Muslim religion," he said.
In another case related to the government's terrorism powers, a federal judge has ruled unconstitutional key portions of a presidential order that blocks financial assistance to terrorist groups. The Washington Post reports that the provisions are "impermissibly vague because they allow the president to unilaterally designate organizations as terrorist groups and broadly prohibit association with such groups."
Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official in the Reagan years who has criticized the Bush administration's broad assertions of executive power, said that appealing Collins's ruling may carry more risks for the government than simply changing the executive order's language.
"If they take this up on appeal, they risk another repudiation of this omnipotent-presidency theory that they have," Fein said.
but to erase them . . its a load of crap !
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