Mayfield held by FBI: coincidence?

Great Debates
1

Link.

Mayfield is the guy held for a few weeks by the FBI whose fingerprint supposedly matched one found in the Spain bombing case. He was recently released, and the FBI admits they were in error. I thought it was pretty odd at first, but what seems really, really odd is that Mayfield is a convert to Islam. OK, I’m one of the first people around here to laugh at conspiracy theories, but what’s going on here? What are the odds that a random fingerprint search from Spain is going to **just happen ** to nab a convert to Islam in the US?

Any thoughts on this? I’m surprised this topic hasn’t surfaced here yet. Is it possible that Mayfield was on some “watch list” and got picked up on extremely flimsy evidence? No one seems to be putting 2 and 2 together here. Maybe I’m just missing some key facts to explain the seeming “coincidence” here.

2

It is of course passing strange. But coincidences do happen. Before I get too carried away I’d like to know how complete and clear the Spanish fingerprints are and how closely Mr. Maxwell’s prints match. That requires expert knowledge that is not commonly held and requires independent examination of the Spanish prints and Mr. Maxwell’s. I don’t figure that will happen any time soon.

In the meantime I will focus on the conversion of the Aztecs to Christianity, my mistake, on the efforts to shove parliamentary democracy down Iraqi throats.

3

Yeah,

me too…

Still, if I push myself,

perhaps you have stated what has become routine.

Let me put it another way:

At frequeint intervals, as one or another of the bizarre (there is no other word for it) Admin.attempts a prevarication uinravels, someone says:

They can’t be lying–no one would be dumb enough to try and sell this as a lie;you’d pick a better story to go with, if you were free of factual restraints…

And then, lo and benold, turns out that someone was just that stupid

(cf, the wedding party story)

Couple that with the arrogance of impunity.

Here let me I bring in the NY Police Dept.
Thjey used to have a thing called a “throwdown”

anytime a cop shot someone, he would have on his person a previously acquired gun with no provenance. This gun he would throwdown near the body, so he could later say that the shooting was in self defense.

Somewheer along the line, the cops stopped using throwdowns, because they didn’t need them
Any old bullshit story was ok with internal affairs.

A cell Phone

A candy Bar.

Anyhthing that could “glint”

a “furtive gesture”

so the throwdown, which was always a complkication, fell out of facvor

my point here is that when they don’t feel it necesdsarfy to even begin to tell a coherenmt story, its because they are so used to getting away with telling absurd lies.

Like, for instance, the one you are having trouble with here.

4

I heard a piece on this on CNN today, and the explanation offered was that the FBI had a “very poor copy” of the Spanish fingerprint. The elephant in the living room seems to be: if the match had been made to Joe Christian in the US, would the FBI have checked more carefully, or grabbed the guy off the street like they did to Mayfield.

5

Yes, ouY wonderm.

6

I think he ws already on a watch list from representing one or more of the victims of the early immigration sweeps–

to me the only real question is whether they picked him up on a humbug actually related to Madrid, or wanted to use madrid to sweat him on some other issue.

remember, while you are their guest, they don’t just leave you sitting around all day, bored, with no company.

They come by to chat often…

Or, to put it another way.

Given that 70-90% of the lucky guests at the Abu Ghraib Hotel and Spa
…(ask us about colonic irrigation…)

were as innocent as you or I or mayfield,

We probably would prefer to pass on the two free weeks as the spa.

7

ROTFLMAO

8

This isn’t a coincidence, nor is it a conspiracy.

My WAG - The FBI had an uncertain match, or a few uncertain matches, for the fingerprint. Since Mayfield was a recent convert to Islam, they jumped to conclusions and arrested him, the only guy who was a vague match and a Muslim. They found out they were wrong and let him go. Not too suprising, really.

Alaric, write longer paragraphs and spellcheck, for the love of Og! You’re not being too coherenmt.

9

So, is the press reporting this at all? Maybe I’ve missed it, but no one seems to be looking very closely at what went on. The guy was held for 2 weeks! How long does it take to double check a fingerprint?

10

NPR hade a piece on it this afternoon/evening. As I understood it the FBI had a “poor quality digital image” of the Spanish print, ran a computer scan and came up with twenty matches, one of which was Maxwell. From there on it was human selection and matching. What I don’t know, and NPR doesn’t know, is whether the humans who did the matching knew anything about Maxwell or the nineteen other matches before they decided to settle on Maxwell. I suspect the human finger print ID guys did know who Maxwell was. Without pre-knowledge of Maxwell and, as a hypothetical, that the other 19 were elderly elementary female grade school music teachers living in Central Kansas, it makes little sense that the FBI machine would focus on this guy to the exclusion of all others. To think he was selected in a double-blind process just strains credulity.

11

as long as they want it to.

12

It was on all the nightly news shows yesterday. Plus it got play when he was first released. I wouldn’t say it’s a buried story.

13

I think this comes under the heading of

…defining due process down

we’re shrugging at stuff that would have had the top of our heads coming off three years ago…

eg. the subpoenas on that college in Iowa for attendance at an NLG meeting

what they are doing to Lynne Stewart–there was a time when that kind of shit would have had every senior federal judge east of the mississippi charging in phalanx of walkers to defend the right to unintimidated counsel

14

Yeah, alaric, it’s sort of like trying to read my friend Archy’s poetry only Archy makes a hella lot more sense :smiley:

Try paragraphs, please, you’ll like them.

Anyway, couple of old articles from the NY Observer for your consideration: Pro-Stewart and anti-Stewart. Considering some of the stuff she said after 9/11, I’m inclined to the latter camp, although I guess she’s still worth defending on principle. With nose held firmly, but ain’t that often the way. </hijack>

15

No, not the story. We all heard it. The details about why this guy, who just **HAPPENED ** to be a Muslim, was nabbed.

16

Mayfield represented one of the Portland seven (Americans who supposedly went off to fight for al Qaeda after 9/11) in a child custody battle in 2002.

17

Alaric, this makes no sense at all. I don’t even see sentences, let alone paragraphs.

People, this is hardly a conspiracy. Out of 20 people who were rough matches, it went down to human factors and he was the only recent Muslim convert. This made him the most likely target for investigation in their opinion.

I’m definitely not saying that such behaviour is acceptable, but it is extremely likely that this is what occurred. No conspiracy here, it’s just that they don’t want to broadcast that his religion was a major factor in his arrest.

18

It is a well known fact that all Islamists are terrorists. And all blacks are drug dealers. :rolleyes:

19

Read my post again:

It’s good to read the entire post before you make a silly remark. I was commenting on the screwed-up reasoning and knee-jerk racism of the agents responsible.

By the way, I think you mean Muslims, not Islamists, since this guy was the first, not the second. Please think before you post next time, m’kay?

20

Sure you are. :rolleyes:

Not to nitpick too much, but I’ve never seen the word ‘Islamist’ applied to anybody but terrorists. I suppose somebody came up with the term so as to not include all Muslims in that group.