"good enough for FBI work."
I wonder if Cindy "always proud of my country" McCain is proud of this:
[Steven] Wax and his colleagues were lawyers for Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon man who was erroneously jailed for alleged complicity in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. He was picked up as a "material witness" by the Justice Department, which based its suspicion of him--and countless media leaks that portrayed Mayfield, an American citizen who is Muslim, as a possible international terrorist--on what turned out to have been a faulty reading of a fingerprint by the FBI.
When Wax first was retained to defend Mayfield, he did not immediately know that the FBI and Spanish investigators had differed from the start on the fingerprint identification, the sole piece of "evidence" the U.S. government came up with before it swooped down on Mayfield and his family, searching his home through “sneak and peek” tactics authorized under the Patriot Act; leaving his wife and children with the terrifying thought that Mayfield might disappear or be charged with a crime that carried the death penalty.
If you want to read something absolutely chilling, take a look at the excerpt from Chapter One:
Then it happened -- a knock on the door around 9:30 in the morning on Thursday, May 6. People living under a host of dictatorships around the world, from Russia to Latin America to North Korea, have learned to dread the "knock on the door" from the KGB, Cheka, or Stasi. But here in America it is not something we have had to fear since the "visits" from government agents and recruitment of informers during the Communist witch hunts in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Even then, the fear was never widespread. When Brandon answered the knock on his office door in Beaverton that day, his worst nightmare turned real.
Welcome to Bush-Cheney America. And you can bet the GOP wants to keep it this way.
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