Remember Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield was detained for two weeks when the FBI claimed his fingerprint was on a bag linked to the Madrid train bombings? Remember when the FBI said they had received information from Spanish officials that led them to conclude Mayfield's fingerprint was a match? And then when it turned out they were wrong, they tried to blame it on the quality of the image received from the Spanish authorities?

Not true. A new report by independent forensic experts who investigated the debacle finds that FBI agents made up the claim.

Chicago Tribune investigative reporters Maurice Possley and Flynn McRoberts write:

Top FBI fingerprint examiners gave in to peer pressure when they rushed to link an Oregon lawyer to a terrorist attack in Madrid this year, according to a panel of forensic experts convened to explain the highest-profile mistake in the history of modern fingerprint comparison. The finding contradicts the initial explanation given by the FBI, which had blamed the quality of a digital fingerprint image sent by Spanish police in the wake of the March 11 train bombings that killed 191 people.

Instead, the panel found that human error, defensiveness and a failure to follow some fundamental scientific practices, such as proper peer review, led to four of the nation's top fingerprint experts wrongly tying Brandon Mayfield, a Portland-area lawyer and a Muslim, to the bombings. Spanish national police later matched the print to an Algerian man.

....Despite earlier FBI attempts to blame the quality of the fingerprint image--a digital representation e-mailed to the U.S. by Spanish authorities--the report states that "all of the committee members agree that the quality of the images that were used to make the erroneous identification was not a factor."

The report was undertaken at the request of the FBI. An isolated instance? Probably not.