More On Brandon Mayfield VS The Patriot Act.......

......When is sorry just not enough?

We discussed the history of Brandon Mayfield's Patriot Act nightmare and his day in court below. In his column Mayfield trial efforts start on sorry note the Oregonian's David Sarasohn gives us some additional details on Mayfield's first day in court.

Richard Montague was just about the most apologetic lawyer you could find.

Over and over Friday morning in the Portland federal courthouse, the trial lawyer for the Justice Department repeated how sorry the government was about what had happened to Brandon Mayfield, the Muslim lawyer from Beaverton who was arrested and held as a material witness in the Madrid bombings because of a fingerprint match that actually didn't match. Mayfield was innocent, Montague kept saying, it was "an unfortunate mistake," and Mayfield had "no connection to these events whatsoever."

And everybody was really sorry.

Montague was apologizing in the very earliest stages of Mayfield's lawsuit against the government. Friday saw very preliminary skirmishings over whether individuals would be included as defendants, how pretrial discovery would work -- and how much access Mayfield would get to documents involved in secret Patriot Act procedures in his case. At a time when Congress is wrestling over the renewal of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, Portland was seeing the beginnings of a high-profile trial raising questions about one of the act's highest-profile applications.

Accordingly, federal judge Ann Aiken's courtroom welcomed seven different government lawyers, so many that Mayfield's lawyers had to move over, and one D.C. lawyer still had to sit in the audience. But the morning's exchanges suggested they might have to send for reinforcements.

Sloppy and incompetent, a witch hunt or both?

Spence charged that the FBI, seeking a warrant for Mayfield's arrest as a material witness, filled out a partial identification of a partial fingerprint with lots of information about Mayfield's being a Muslim convert and having an Egyptian wife, and speculations that he might have gone to Spain under an assumed name -- although there was no evidence he'd gone anywhere and his passport had lapsed.

"I am sure that had it been Billy Graham, or one of Billy Graham's children, the FBI might have said that we'd better check it out," he mused. ". . . No airline tickets. How did he get over there to Spain? Must have been that magic carpet. The Muslim magic carpet."

And that infamous fingerprint match:

And then there was the matter of the fingerprint match, described by the FBI as "100 percent positive identification," although the Spanish national police, who had the actual print, kept telling the FBI they doubted the match well before Mayfield was actually arrested.

To Montague, the point was that there was a positive identification, and "100 percent" was just an adjective. Spence took a different approach.

"Maybe 51 percent would be OK," Spence wondered expansively. "Maybe 50-50, I don't know. A hundred percent means nothing, he says . . .

"They knew, when they swore under oath that it was 100 percent identification, that it was a load of malarkey."

I think the Patriot Act is a danger to all Americans to begin with but as the Mayfield case points out the FBI cannot be trusted with those powers.

The FBI doesn't need to just apologize to Brandon Mayfield but to the entire country. A country that when it looks at the Mayfield case may find it has about as much to fear from the FBI as it does al-Queda.