Posted on 05/08/2004 2:36:59 PM PDT by Grampa Dave
He met his wife, Mona, a Muslim born in Egypt, while stationed in Tacoma, Wash. The couple married in 1988 and Mayfield converted a year later. At the time, Mona Mayfield was not a practicing Muslim. After the death of her father, the family began attending Friday prayers. But they were never devout.
The FBI took Mona's kid's SPANISH homework.
The MOSQUE asked Mayfield to do Battle's custody suit. Mayfield flew to TEXAS for this.
Do his cases give him the ability to move around making "other" connections as he goes on his cases?
I missed the part where Mayfield went to Texas to work on the custody case - though I did notice that the child lives near Houston now.
Battle didn't attend the same mosque as Mayfield - it was the two Bilal brothers of the Portland Seven that did.
The Moroccan "dignitaries" who were detained for a few hours at the Portland airport had been in Dallas first, which is where they had obtained the Arabic documents with reference to 911, which raised the alarm at the airport. The story is their host in Dallas gave them information about what they should do in case of an emergency. uh-huh
It was the Mosque folks who asked him to do Battle and I assume it was the Bilal mosque.
I just saw it. Her maiden name was Mona Mohamed. Amazing!!
What a surprise!
I hope you recover from the shock before dinner.
update
http://www.kgw.com/sharedcontent/APStories/stories/D82J7ED83.html
Terror arrest: Brandon Mayfield's family waits for answers
05/15/2004
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI / Associated Press
After the FBI agents left, Mona Mayfield wept at her kitchen table, then pulled herself together to survey the damage.
Her house looked like it had been robbed — every room had been ransacked, closets emptied and drawers upturned.
"They took my children's Spanish homework," said Mona Mayfield, standing in her son's room where papers were still spilling out of a half-open cupboard, one week after authorities arrested Brandon Mayfield in connection with Spain's worst terrorist attack.
Mayfield, a struggling Portland attorney and a white convert to Islam, was taken into custody at his suburban law office on May 6, after his fingerprint was allegedly found on a plastic bag in a van near the Alcala de Henares train station outside Madrid.
The bag contained detonators which officials say were of the same kind used to blow up four commuter trains in the Spanish capital on March 11, killing 191 people and injuring 2,000 others.
Eighteen people have been charged so far — six with mass murder and the rest with belonging to a terrorist organization. Mayfield is the only American to have been connected with the bombings, although he has not been charged with a crime.
Mayfield's family insists he is innocent. To them, the missing Spanish homework shows that federal agents are desperate to find evidence.
"They can turn anyone into a terrorist," said Mona Mayfield.
A former Army officer, Brandon Mayfield has not been outside the United States since serving at the Bitburg air base in Germany in the 1990s, she said.
According to senior law enforcement officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the FBI is convinced the fingerprint in Madrid is Mayfield's. But Spanish officials, as well as U.S. counterterrorism experts, have raised doubts.
Three days after Mayfield's arrest, forensic experts in Spain told the newspaper El Pais that they found only eight points of similarity between the print on the plastic bag and Mayfield's, instead of the 15 required for an exact match.
Senior U.S. law enforcement officials said Mayfield had been under surveillance for several weeks before his arrest. When it became clear that news about him might leak out, the Justice Department decided to place him in custody, officials said.
It's a move that raises red flags for counterterrorism expert Michael Greenberger, a former U.S. Department of Justice official.
"The fact that they are using the material witness statute shows they don't have probable cause to arrest him. They're scrambling to find a way to detain him," said Greenberger, who now heads the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Homeland Security.
Under the 1984 material witness statute, prosecutors can seek an arrest warrant and hold an individual without filing charges if the witness' testimony is considered crucial and there is a reasonable risk of the witness fleeing. In the Bush administration's war on terror, the statute has been used to detain possible terror suspects without filing charges.
Portland has its own example — one that proved doubters of an earlier terrorism investigation here wrong. Mike Hawash, a former Intel software engineer, was arrested and held for five weeks without being charged. His case led to a public outcry and a "Free Mike Hawash" campaign.
But six months later, Hawash pleaded guilty to conspiracy to wage war against the United States, as did five others accused of planning to help the Taliban fight American forces.
Mayfield has ties to Jeffrey Battle, one of the six.
Mayfield was not involved in the criminal case, but instead represented Battle in a custody hearing involving his child. Family members say a local mosque approached Mayfield, asking him to take the case.
Quanell X, head of the New Black Muslim Movement in Houston and a Battle family friend, said Mayfield went out of his way to help Battle, flying to Houston, Texas, on his own money to represent the terrorism suspect in the domestic dispute.
Mayfield converted to Islam after marrying Mona, who immigrated to rural Washington as a child.
"My initial reaction was he's a Muslim because he's married to Mona and his own heart is still Christian. He never adopted the outward symbols of the faith — he trimmed his beard and wore American clothes," said Washburn University law professor Ali Khan in Topeka, Kan., where Mayfield attended law school.
Mayfield's 63-year-old mother has come to Aloha from Kansas to bring order to her son's home.
"He was a delightful child — a happy baby who never cried," said AvNell Mayfield. "This (his arrest) is a terrible mistake," she said.
The living room of the white clapboard house had been cleaned up after the FBI raid. But the bedrooms were still in disarray.
"This is so embarrassing," said Mona Mayfield, standing in the bedroom she shared with her husband, where her clothes are spilling out of the closet. "This is not the way I live."
Mayfield's mother and his younger brother have taken a leave of absence from their jobs in Kansas to be with Mona. The Mayfield's three children, ages 10, 12 and 15, have been provided security at their local schools.
"Either charge him, so he can defend himself, or set him free," said Kent Mayfield, 35, the attorney's brother. "In the meantime, peoples' lives are being destroyed."
AvNell Mayfield recalled a sensitive boy who once nursed an injured bluejay back to health and was fond of watercolors.
She was able to see her son on Mother's Day.
"They take you in a little cubicle. There's a glass thing and a telephone, just like in the movies," she said.
Mayfield told his mother: "Usually on Mother's Day, I would have made an effort to come to you. This time you came to me."
Ain't that special. American Muslims have their own law professor -- and he judges them on their Muslimness, too. I wonder if Mayfield was ever pressured to prove himself to be true to the faith with a special test.
He wasn't raised a Christian, so why assume his heart was Christian, unless Ali Khan is a prejudiced law professor.
Also this struggling lawyer and family man paid his own airfare to Houston from Portland to represent Battle in a doomed child custody case? No way did he stand a chance in heck to win this one. This was a courier run.....
Uh-oh. My second son was a very colicky baby who cried for 5 months. I guess he's the one who should be an Islamic terrorist these days.
another article:
Wife: `He did nothing wrong'
Husband held as witness in Spain bombing
By TOMAS ALEX TIZON
Los Angeles Times
ALOHA, Ore. -- Mona Mayfield answers her front door with a smile and an outstretched hand. She is pleasant and polite, going out of her way to make a stranger feel at home.
But her swollen eyes betray her. In a moment she is crying and barely able to speak.
"He did nothing wrong," she says, her voice heavy with grief.
She is referring to her husband, Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer being held at the Multnomah County Detention Center as a material witness in connection with the March train bombings in Madrid, Spain. A fingerprint on a plastic bag led to his arrest.
(excerpt)
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/2572829
Other reports say he attended community college on a track scholarship before joining the Army.
And so stuff is still hanging out of the drawers a week after the FBI left??
He flew to Houston for Battle on his own funds?? There is a Bieri lake and several dams named Bieri...and I believe it's not too far from Houston.
They definitely have the victim act down cold. It's a great diversion from the evidence of guilt - all of this "evidence" of innocence. He was such a good baby.
A Bulgarian has also been arrested in connection with the Madrid train bombing:
http://www.brunei-online.com/bb/fri/may14w32.htm
MADRID (AFP) - Bulgarian police are holding a Bulgarian suspect in the Madrid train bombings, identified as Tony Rades, whom they arrested early last month, Spanish police said Wednesday.
Rades' name appeared on documents found during police raids following the March 11 attacks, and is thought to have been involved in planning them.
Spanish state radio said Rades, the first Bulgarian in the case, was linked to some of the mobile telephones used to detonate bombs left in backpacks on four suburban trains in Madrid, where the near simultaneous explosions claimed 191 lives.
The suspect, who left Spain on March 3, was arrested April 8, but his detention was not made public until Wednesday by Bulgaria's intelligence services.
Thirteen people, mostly Moroccans, are in detention in Spain in connection with the bombings, while another seven blew themselves up on April 3 when police were closing in on them at an apartment in the Madrid suburb of Leganes.
They were the presumed perpetrators of the attacks.
A further seven suspects remain at large.
I wonder if the detained Bulgarian has been interrogated this past month? I wonder what techniques were used, and if they were helpful? I also wonder if he is a Muslim....
To be a "struggling lawyer" in modern America means not focusing enough on one's practice.
Our dear Mr. Mayfield appears to have been preoccupied with other, extralegal matters.
ping -- more updated info here
Thanks.
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