Apologizing has become very fashionable for US government agencies; even the FBI is doing it now: FBI Apologizes to Lawyer Over Madrid Case.

The apology Monday came hours after a judge dismissed the case against Brandon Mayfield, who had been held as a material witness in the Madrid bombings case, which killed 191 people and injured about 2,000 others.

Mayfield, a 37-year-old convert to Islam, sharply criticized the government, calling his time behind bars “humiliating” and “embarrassing” and saying he was targeted because of his faith.

“This whole process has been a harrowing ordeal. It shouldn’t happen to anybody,” said Mayfield. “I believe I was singled out and discriminated against, I feel, as a Muslim.”

Karin J. Immergut, the U.S. attorney in Oregon, denied Mayfield had been a target because of his religion and maintained that the FBI had followed all laws in the case.

Court documents released Monday suggested that the mistaken arrest first sprang from an error by the FBI’s supercomputer for matching fingerprints and then was compounded by the FBI’s own analysts.

“The FBI apologizes to Mr. Mayfield and his family for the hardships that this matter has caused,” the bureau said in a statement. The agency also said it would review its practices on fingerprint analyses.

“We need to know more about how this happened. All of us in this country need to know more about how this type of mistake can be made,” said U.S. Public Defender Steve Wax, Mayfield’s attorney.

Mayfield, a former Army lieutenant, was released last week. But he was not altogether cleared of suspicion; the government said he remained a material witness and put restrictions on his movements.

Those restrictions were lifted Monday.

No doubt, this case will now be brought up by CAIR every time a US Muslim is arrested in connection with terrorism. Way to go, FBI.

Although it’s not hard to understand why Mr. Mayfield is unhappy about being erroneously arrested, it should be noted that in Arab-Muslim countries, people like him are arrested every day on mistaken and/or deliberately false charges—and never seen again. Mayfield is free, all his property will be returned and copies of documents destroyed, and he’s received a public apology.

And his claim that he was “targeted because of his faith” seems to leave out the little inconvenient fact that he was linked to one of the chief defendants in the “Portland Seven” jihad group, whose surviving six members pled guilty to all charges. In other words, with a fingerprint match and this connection, there was reason for suspicion; Mayfield wasn’t picked at random out of a list of Muslims.