Elden Rosenthal does not fear the government wiretapping his phone.
“You have to have a little bit of courage to be a civil rights lawyer,” Rosenthal told a crowd at the law school Tuesday night. “Every now and then I just swear at George Bush in the telephone loudly.”
His comment was in response to a question he was asked during a forum where he spoke about the lead up to and consequences of Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield’s challenge to parts of the USA Patriot Act.
University Professor Garrett Epps introduced Rosenthal, calling him “one of the most important members of that small band of guardians” who will fight to protect civil liberties.
Rosenthal explained the history of the Mayfield case and domestic surveillance in America.
Rosenthal said the full power of the federal government was focused on the Mayfield family after the FBI falsely identified the Muslim lawyer as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings in 2004.
After the bombing, Spanish police found a fingerprint on a bag containing explosive-detonating devices. The fingerprints were run through a computer program that compared them to prints in a FBI database. Rosenthal said of all the fingerprints in the database, Mayfield’s emerged as the fourth-most likely match.
Mayfield’s fingerprints were in the database because he had been in the U.S. Army and, Rosenthal said, from a juvenile encounter with police.
“We do not know, and we will never know, when the FBI learned that Mr. Mayfield was Muslim,” Rosenthal said.
But it is known that the FBI tapped Mayfield’s home and office phones, searched his home and office when he was not present, copied the hard drives from his computers and were staked out in front of his family’s home non-stop during the investigation, Rosenthal said.
“Although nothing of significance was found, Mr. Mayfield was later arrested and held in solitary confinement and as a material witness,” Rosenthal said. “He was told that he could be executed.”
The government used the Patriot Act and a rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, both passed after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, to investigate and detain Mayfield.
An audience member asked if the public can undo the harm Rosenthal was describing without impeaching President Bush. Without impeachment, she said, the next president could hold on to and exercise the powers granted by the Patriot Act. So is there any hope?
“The answer is, of course, yes,” Rosenthal answered. “It’s the reason we have a lifetime appointment, unelected judiciary.”
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