[crazyhorse691]

Mayfield belongs to the same Mosque as the Portland 7(6 of which plead guilty and the 7th died in Afghanistan fighting the US). The FBI field agents are blameless on this. The lab was the weak link.

[VOA]

The lab was the weak link.

That's the crux of the screw-up.
I hope the lab is shaped-up...and they take note of some of the current
reports (on in the WSJ a month or so ago) about the fallibility
in finger-print IDs.
(I'm pro-law enforcement, but apparently fingerprint interpretation
is more fallible than often admitted.)

[Ramius]

I'm not even sure it's fair to "blame" the lab or anybody else on this one. Apparently the fingerprints were all extremely similar such that a few different sets of expert eyes all were fooled for a while.

In the end though, the fingerprint differences were discovered and this guy's prints were excluded. That's not a mistake, that's just how investigations sometimes work. Yes, one can say that they were mistakenly identified... but it wasn't a procedural or process error-- it was a re-analysis of prints that at first genuinely appeared to match.

To call any of this a "problem" at the FBI suggests that the FBI or anybody else in the investigation should have acted any differently given the information they had at the time. They should not have.