What’s It All About?

"...it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.” - The Trial by Franz Kafka


On May 8, I read the story of the arrest of Portland attorney, Brandon Mayfield. Newspapers reported that Spanish investigators had found his phone number in the bomb blasted apartment of the seven men wanted by the law for the terror bombing of a Spanish train on March 11, 2004. The reports also mentioned that his fingerprint was found on a plastic bag that held bomb detonators. Because he was in Portland on the day of the bombing, he was not suspected of participating in the terrorism, but was being held as a material witness. Meaning, I supposed, that he knew someone connected or had helped the terrorists in some way.

There were several more reports over the weeks justifying his arrest by exposing his background as a former US army lieutenant and a “white” convert to Islam. A few blurbs on TV showed his obviously Muslim wife explaining to the press how the FBI arrested her husband without charging him with a crime and invaded their home and took belongings and confidential client files. Her name is Mona and she looked like a serious, calm and determined woman who would not support a wild assed, terrorizing murderer. I had yet to see a photo of Brandon Mayfield and, intrigued, I located his photo and scratched my head. He looked completely levelheaded and understandably grim.

Each little dot of information seemed to take on a life of its own but the connecting line seemed to be that he is a Muslim. Digging a little deeper, I finally found the truly revealing dot of information: Mayfield had served as a child-custody lawyer for one of the Portland Seven; a group of Muslims accused of attempting to wage war on the United States. Uh Oh! Maybe the FBI was right this time. Maybe the provision in the Patriot Act that allows the FBI to invade a “suspects” home without their knowledge and detain them without charge is justified if people like Mayfield can do their dirty deeds in Portland.

Shortly before discovering a homegrown terrorist in our midst, I saw the excellent and frightening PBS program on the Weather Underground, a violent splinter group of the Students for a Democratic Society that was so influential on college campuses during the Viet Nam war years. This look back at the radical anti-war, anti-government 1960s brought back vague memories of federal building bombings, Patty Hearst bank robberies, and bloody shootouts. It also showed seemingly nerdy men and women who were capable of planning and executing terrible violence while eluding detection for years. Many of the ringleaders eventually went to jail or are still in jail, but some lived underground for decades.

Mayfield’s connection to anti-American activists hit a nerve and for weeks I was convinced he was detained (nice word) deservedly. Then last week, Spain challenged the FBI’s database evidence claiming that the fingerprints belonged to a man from Algeria and that they had tried to convince the FBI of this fact since April. What is truly puzzling is that the FBI would use the 1984 fingerprints of Mayfield, prints taken for a minor burglary when he was a teenager. Why didn’t they verify these old prints with his army prints or his law license prints? It's a good thing that the Spanish investigators were not bogged down with databases and computers and could look outside the grim and frightening little box in which the FBI had placed Mayfield. Maybe the FBI did cross check and verify old finger prints with new. I hope so, but their apology to Mayfield makes me wonder. Here it is.

"The FBI apologizes to Mr. Mayfield and his family for the hardships that this matter has caused," the bureau said in a statement. The agency also said it would review its practices on fingerprint analyses.

The article doesn’t attribute this apology to a person just to the FBI, so maybe that’s the problem. The FBI has become a digital machine and has lost its intuitive abilities. I’m beginning to believe that our government is ignoring the prime directive of the digital age: garbage in = garbage out. Too many resources are being spent on collecting garbage and too few are spent on assessing what is true. In Mayfield’s case truth lost out to necessity.


Sometimes I hate it when a person is right, especially Kafka.
AK