American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award — Winner in the Book category

Independent Publishers — Winner of the Gold Medal in the Autobiography/Memoir category

ForeWord Book of the Year Awards — Winner of the Bronze Medal in the Social Science category

The Eric Hoffer Award - Winner in the Memoir category

A public defender's dedicated struggle to rescue two innocent men from the recent Kafkaesque practices of our vandalized justice system

Our government can make you disappear. Those were the words Steven Wax never imagined he would hear himself say. In his twenty-nine years as a public defender, Wax had never had to warn a client that he or she might be taken away to a military brig, or worse, a black site, one of our country's dreaded secret prisons. How had our country come to this?� The disappearance of people happens in places ruled by tyrants, military juntas, fascist strongmen--governments with such contempt for the rule of law that they strip their citizens of all rights. But in America?

Under the current Bush administration, not only are the civil rights of foreigners in jeopardy, but those of U.S. citizens. Wax interweaves the stories of two men that he and his team represented: Brandon Mayfield, an American-born small town lawyer and family man, arrested as a suspected terrorist in the Madrid train station bombings after a fingerprint was incorrectly traced back to him by the FBI; and Adel Hamad, a Sudanese hospital administrator taken from his apartment to a Pakistani prison and then flown in chains to the United States military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Kafka Comes to America reveals where and how our civil liberties have been eroded for a false security, and how each of us can make a difference. If these events could happen to Brandon Mayfield and Adel Hamad, they can happen to anyone. It could happen to us. It could happen to you.

"Federal public defender Wax masterfully delivers a harrowing story of the erosion of civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks in a powerful testimony that reads like a thriller. Wax follows the stories of two men he represented, both victims of post-9/11 counterterrorism measures. The first — American citizen and fellow lawyer Brandon Mayfield — was arrested by the FBI as a suspect in the Madrid train station bombings in 2004, after the FBI claimed that a latent fingerprint found on the scene matched Mayfield's. The second story revolves around Adel Hamad, a Sudanese-born hospital administrator arrested in Pakistan while doing refugee relief work. Imprisoned for six months in 'a fetid hell' for alleged connections with al-Qaeda, Hamad was hooded and shackled and transferred to Guantnamo Bay, where he has languished for the past four years. With considerable finesse, the author narrates these two gripping stories in alternating chapters through each stage of his clients' cases. Wax offers personal insight and professional outrage; his is a powerful voice that deserves to reach all Americans. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Before they were falsely accused of terrorism, Brandon Mayfield, an American lawyer in Oregon, and Adel Hamad, a Sudanese relief worker in Pakistan, had little in common but their Muslim faith. Then came the political, military and legal maelstrom that followed the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. On opposite ends of the globe, Hamad and Mayfield were ensnared in the roundup of those considered... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) security threats. Both were jailed without charge, Mayfield for 19 days in his home state and Hamad for more than five years in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

But the two men soon shared one key thing that improved their lot: lawyer Steven T. Wax, whose chilling account of injustice in the war on terror, "Kafka Comes to America," leans heavily on the experiences of these two clients he helped exonerate and free. "Their fates, the citizen and the alien, are linked," writes Wax, a Harvard Law School graduate serving his seventh term as the federal public defender in Oregon. "They are a cautionary tale for all of us."

Oregon was an early front in the legal battles that emerged from the war on terror, the home of an alleged sleeper cell busted for conspiring to fight alongside the Taliban. Wax, who was born in a Jewish enclave in Brooklyn, is a charter member of the self-styled "Guantanamo Bar Association," the informal league of private lawyers, military and government defense counsels, public-interest litigators and law professors who have represented detainees. "When asked now how I can defend Muslim terrorists, the answer is easy for me," says Wax, who along with his colleagues has been criticized for representing people accused of fighting, or at least plotting, against the United States. "I am defending a principle that protects all of us, the rule of law that keeps us safe."

Mayfield and Hamad, like many others caught up in the government's dragnet, were never terrorists. Of the two, Hamad clearly endured harsher treatment. Seized from his Peshawar home in the dark of night by Pakistani forces (with a blond American leading the way), he contracted dysentery from rotten food and filthy water during six months in a fetid prison. After he was transferred to Afghanistan, his jailors interrogated him repeatedly about ties to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, which he consistently denied. He arrived at Guantanamo in March 2003 and was assigned to Wax after petitioning for habeas corpus relief, claiming that his detention was unlawful.

But American readers probably will be more shocked by what happened to Mayfield, who served two stints in the U.S. Army, converted to Islam in the early 1990s after falling in love with an Egyptian-born woman (who is now his wife) and voted for George W. Bush in 2000. Soon after the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, his family noticed footprints on their carpet and discovered that a deadbolt they never used had been locked into place. The fear that they were being watched was confirmed when the FBI raided their home and arrested Mayfield. The court document that led to his arrest claimed Spanish investigators had turned up a fingerprint that matched Mayfield's with "100 percent certainty." It later emerged that Spanish authorities always doubted that assessment and were inclined to link the print to someone else.

Wax's title refers to Franz Kafka's 1925 novel "The Trial," in which a man is arrested on secret evidence and charged with an undisclosed crime. "Kafka Comes to America" is partly a memoir of a life spent defending — and, early in his career, prosecuting — criminals; partly a treatise on post-9/11 law; and partly a case study of the war on terror's heavy human cost. As such, it has a disjointed structure that can be hard to follow. An impassioned advocate, Wax is sometimes prone to melodrama, beginning with his opening line: "In January 2002, the gates of Hell opened in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba."

He reserves his harshest judgments for senior Bush administration officials, including former attorney general John Ashcroft, whom he accuses of lying to Congress about Mayfield's case. But he treats the administration's foot soldiers — such as a guard at Guantanamo who casually told Wax he was glad to be "contributing" to the nation's safety — with surprising sympathy. "There are many different ways we Americans express our patriotism and compassion," he writes, "and it is important to honor them all."

Despite a few overreaching comparisons (to East Germany under the Stasi, for example), the book is more balanced than polemical. While decrying that his two clients' lives "were turned upside down based on a mistake," Wax allows that "in the end our system offered both of them help" and praises "the strength of America and its institutions."

A good lawyer may be even more important. Wax's clients benefited from innovative and unrelenting advocacy. He sent staffers to war zones to verify clients' claims and persuaded Sudan's government to seek the release of Hamad, who is still a Sudanese citizen. When thwarted by new statutes blocking access to federal courts, Wax's legal team exerted public pressure through videos posted on YouTube that described Hamad's plight.

Two years after the military determined that he posed no threat, Hamad was freed in 2007 and returned to his family in Sudan. Mayfield was released after Spanish authorities found a different match for the controversial fingerprint. He reportedly settled a lawsuit against the FBI for $2 million.

Other detainees have been far less fortunate. Wax cites an Army study in July 2007 that found only 53 percent of Guantanamo detainees "definitively supported or waged hostile activities" and just 35 percent belonged to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. Some were literally sold to U.S. forces for bounties when the United States offered $5,000 for al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2001-02. Meanwhile, in a 2006 speech recounted in the book, President Bush asserted that "we have in place a rigorous process to ensure those held at Guantanamo Bay belong at Guantanamo."

Wax joins a growing chorus calling for the closure of that prison, though he acknowledges that some Guantanamo prisoners should remain incarcerated. "Kafka Comes to America" says little else about how the U.S. military should handle detainees in the future. But his clients' experiences more than justify Wax's softly stated conclusion: "Of course the threat from terrorists is real, but the unfortunate reality is that the threat from an overzealous response to terrorism is real as well."

Reviewed by Jonathan Finer, who spent a total of 18 months in Iraq as a correspondent for The Washington Post between 2003 and 2006, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Wax (Federal Public Defender for the District of Oregon) addresses the extrajudicial detention powers the Bush administration has claimed in the name of the "Global War on Terror" by weaving together the stories of two men he has represented: Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon attorney held as a material witness for over two weeks after the government mistakenly linked him to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man working in a hospital in Pakistan who was seized and imprisoned by Pakistani intelligence in July of 2002 before being flown to the US Guantanamo Bay Naval Base where he remained until his release and repatriation to Sudan in December of 2007. He also warns of the dangers posed to Americans and foreigners alike of the attacks on civil liberties that are being waged in the name of security. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)