When law enforcement officials make mistakes, there is an all-too-human temptation to press on rather than admit an error. Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer in Oregon, was arrested in connection with the bombing of commuter trains in Madrid, even though he had never been to Spain. Spanish authorities had taken a fingerprint from a plastic bag discovered at the scene and F.B.I. officials thought it matched Mr. Mayfield's prints, which were among the many from discharged soldiers in the enormous federal database.

The American investigators must have felt they hit pay dirt when they discovered that Mr. Mayfield was a convert to Islam, that his wife had been born in Egypt and that he had once represented a terrorism defendant in a child custody case. The fact that there was no indication he had been out of the country in a decade did not sway them. Neither did the fact that Spanish authorities were telling them that the fingerprints did not actually match. Mr. Mayfield was held for two weeks, even though the only other connections between him and terrorism were things like the fact, as the F.B.I. pointed out, that his law firm advertised in a "Muslim yellow page directory" whose publisher had once had a business relationship with Osama bin Laden's former personal secretary.

When the Spaniards linked the fingerprint to an Algerian man in May, Mr. Mayfield's case was dismissed and the F.B.I. did apologize. But the ordeal could have dragged on much longer if the investigation had not involved another nation, whose police were not invested in the idea that the Oregon lawyer was the culprit. And it could have been endless if Mr. Mayfield had been an undocumented worker being held in post-9/11 secrecy, or if he had been picked up in Afghanistan as a suspected Taliban fighter and held incommunicado at Guantánamo.

Anyone who needs another demonstration of how difficult it is for law enforcement authorities to acknowledge error can always look to the case of Capt. James Yee. A Muslim convert, Captain Yee was a chaplain at Guantánamo until he was taken into custody on suspicion of espionage. He was held in solitary confinement for nearly three months, during which time authorities realized that the case against him was nonexistent. Rather than simply let him go, they charged him with mishandling classified material. The charges seemed to have much less to do with security concerns than official face-saving. And to repay Captain Yee for its self-inflicted embarrassment, the military went at great lengths in court to prove he was having an affair with a female officer. While that had nothing to do with security either, it did humiliate the defendant in public, as well as his wife and child, who were present at the trial.

Virtually every time the Bush administration feels cornered, it falls back on the argument that the president and his officials are honorable men and women. This is an invitation to turn what should be a debate about policy into a referendum on the hearts of the people making it. But this nation was organized under a rule of law, not a dictatorship of the virtuous. The founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights specifically because they did not believe that honorable men always do the right thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/04/opinion/04SUN1.html