by TChris

It's true, as the NY Times editorializes, that the FBI and Justice Department "ought to hang their heads in shame over the mistaken arrest and jailing" of Brandon Mayfield. This isn't the first time that the FBI has followed -- in David Cole's words -- an "arrest first, ask questions later" policy.

Mayfield is fortunate that the Spanish National Police took a more professional approach than the FBI, which confidently announced that a fingerprint found on a bag of detonators tied to train bombings in Madrid was a "100 percent match" with Mayfield's prints. When Spanish investigators met with the FBI to question that conclusion, the FBI came away from the meeting believing that the Spanish police "felt satisfied" with the FBI's analysis. More likely, the FBI -- an agency that doesn't respond well to criticism -- felt satisfied that the Spanish police shouldn't be questioning their conclusions. In any event, the Spanish investigators didn't give up after being brushed off by the FBI; they continued their work and matched the prints with a more likely suspect.

Props to the Spanish police for their professionalism. They kept an innocent man from getting into a whole lot of trouble. The FBI and Justice Department should hang their heads not only for botching the fingerprint analysis, but for advising a judge that they had cause to arrest Mayfield because of a contact between Mayfield and a man on a terrorism watch list that, according to Mayfield, never occurred, and because Mayfield advertised in a Muslim "yellow pages" and attended a mosque (not as incriminating as taking out an ad in the Terrorist Gazette or attending a terrorist picnic, but apparently proof of guilt to the Justice Department).