Remembering the plight of Brandon Mayfield

With Sharia Mayfield making her way into politics, it's worth remembering the major political history this family has.

I think the media isn’t doing a great job of helping the public understand who Sharia Mayfield is and her family’s deep connection to the political scene of Portland.

Sharia is the daughter of Brandon Mayfield, whose story I’ll summarize below. Sharia cowrote a book with her father called Improbable Cause: The War on Terror's Assault on the Bill of Rights which you can buy right now through Powells for just $16.

The short story is that Brandon Mayfield was stalked and kidnapped by the federal government, held incommunicado for two weeks, and was framed with a heinous act of international terrorism, the 2004 Madrid train bombings.

But just the FBI decided to go even further and harass and doing surveillance of his family, like stealing young Sharia Mayfield's spanish homework and using it as evidence of Brandon Mayfield's terrorism connection. Essentially the feds wanted to fuck this guy over because he represented The Portland 7, a group of young black Muslim kids targeted by the FBI after 9/11.

Who/What/Why were the Portland 7 targeted? Because one of them was the son of a predominate Black Panther leader in town Kent Ford, so the FBI set about entrapping them and established a parrallel construction narrative: while these boys were out shooting a local cop got an anonymous tip that it was "suspicious", so the local cop in Washington assess the situation, decides a few black guys shooting rifles in the back country certainly warrants a counter-terrorism investigation by the federal government.

Then, somehow, the group gets it in their head from a CIA or federal agent named Habis Abdulla al Saoub that they all needed to travel to Afghanistan to join Al Qaeda, even though they had no practical plan or visas or funding to do so. It’s worth pointing out that no confirmation exists that Al Saoub was actually an Agent, it’s patently obvious to me when you consider how informants and undercover agents like this are utilized, and somehow once his utility expired he “disappeared”, 100% confirmed to have died in battle, like the DOD is doing DNA samples of militants.

Anyways, Portland 7 guys return home from failing to join the Taliban and, surprise! the FBI has been watching them the whole time and the fact they took this quixotic trip oversees proved their guilt!

Brandon Mayfield took on this case as their lawyer and that royally pissed off the FBI. Not only was Brandon Mayfield a dirty Muslim, but also prior military and knew the ropes and was going to get the charges dismissed or reduced in a plea. The case didn't go great for the DOJ, and this Mayfield guy was a real thorn in the side.

So at some point a federal agent decides that they're going to remove Brandon Mayfield from the playing table, and when the Madrid Train Bombing happened the American FBI decided to force Brandon Mayfield into being the fall guy for it. Or, maybe they didn’t care to make him the fall guy, but they were going to persecute him either way. A single finger print was suspiciously recovered at the site of the Madrid bombing, and Interpol asked if any nation had matching fingerprints. FBI pipes in, "Yes, here's this terrorist lawyer's fingerprint from his military service record - it's a match!" Interpol looked at it and said, "What in the living fuck are you talking about, they're not even similar, and by the way we found a suspect who was in Madrid at the time, not living 9,000 miles away." But really, on the Spanish side of things, there was a good amount of conspiratorial assumptions about if the bombing was even related to Islamic terrorism or domestic terrorism. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was another Gladio-inspired event backed by American powers to justify Spanish military intervention in Iraq.

But, regardless of the actual bombing, the FBI ignored all the evidence and raided Brandon Mayfield's home while his wife and kids were gone, on suspicion that somehow he pulled off a heinous train bombing in Europe without leaving the country, based on a finger print that didn't even match. They also tossed the house and stole a bunch of property to make it seem like he'd been kidnapped.

This incident made it completely clear: if you resist the tyranny of the FBI we can invent reasons to come after you and throw you in a torture facility meant for terrorists. Don’t. Fuck. With. Us.

Portland residents found it so shocking and disgusting that we withdrew from the FBI program that was surveilling Brandon Mayfield, called the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). We stayed out of that program until Mohammed Mohammed was entrapped and instructed by the FBI to carry out the Christmas Tree Bombing, that was a catalyst for the city to rejoin the JTTF.

This history isn’t an endorsement of Sharia Mayfield’s political opinions, I truly haven’t even bothered to look into them, because her chances of winning one of the most powerful positions in Oregon government is basically impossible. Meanwhile, other candidates for this position, like Shannon Singleton, straight up took a bribe to drop out of the race. Unless you’re willing to bribe or sabotage people, you ain’t ruthless enough.