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January 6, 2006
FBI uses Patriot Act to destroy innocent citizen
FBI securocrats abused the Patriot Act and destroyed an innocent citizen's life and professional reputation. Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon attorney, was arrested in 2004 when incompetent FBI examiners erroneously concluded that his fingerprints were on a bag of detonators related to the train bombings in Madrid. But, they weren't his fingerprints. And the incompetent dolts at the FBI should have know that. The inspector general indicated that the FBI miscreants "committed errors in the examination procedure, and that the misidentification could have been prevented". However, they Inspector General went on to erroneously conclude that they didn't abuse the Patiot Act, they merely exercised it. Welcome to the twilight zone of bureaucracy without bounds and the new zero tolerance of civil liberties.
They explain in detail how they went through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act(FISA) court to get approval for their illegal, unwarranted searches of his premises. What they don't mention is that the FISA court is a Potemkin Court. It's such a joke that the head of the FISA court resigned in disgust last month. The Patriot Act makes the FISA court, essentially, obsolete. The Inspector General is just dancing around the details here, trying to make pretty.
Needless to say, there will be no punishment for the incompetent sycophants at the FBI. Keep in mind that this is the same FBI that's out executing citizens. That wiretapped Martin Luther King and "quashed an FBI investigation of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four young black girls". The same FBI that's planning a grand new office in DC.
Hat Tip to the idiots at the CounterTerrorism blog for swallowing the heavily redacted version of the Inspector General's report hook, line, and sinker. It takes a special kind of blind faith to accept a censored report from a biased source as gospel without batting an eye. This raises gullibility to a new level. They won't even let out the whole story, for Christ's sake. Arrrgh.
Update: OMG. I've been reading the Inspector General's report. You wouldn't believe what the FBI did. Please don't read their report. I will make you ill when you read how grossly inept our FBI fingerprint analysts are. And when Spain told them they had the wrong guy, their hubris was such that they didn't even go back and re-examine the latent fingerprint. They just assumed the people in Spain were wrong becuase they couldn't speak English.
Update 2: The Patriot Act directly contributed to the illegal harassment and persecution of Brandon Mayfield. The report states:
"However, we found that the Patriot Act did affect the government's dissemination of intelligence information about Mayfield. By dismantling the "wall" between criminal and intelligence investigators, the Patriot Act allowed the government to freely share intelligence information about Mayfield gathered in the FISA surveillance and searches with prosecutors and other criminal law enforcement officials. In addition, Section 203 of the Patriot Act allowed the government to share grand jury information with the intelligence community, some of which could not have been obtained and shared through intelligence methods prior to the Patriot Act."
Technorati tags: Securocrats, FISA, FBI, Patriot Act, Brandon Mayfield
Posted by Peenie Wallie on January 6, 2006 at 8:11 PM
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