Kafka Comes to America: Fighting for Justice in the War on
Terror - A Public Defender's Inside Account, by Steven T. Wax; Other Press; First Edition (June 3, 2008). ISBN-10:
1590512952. Hardcover, $22.89; 380
pages.
Wax, the head of the Oregon Federal Public Defenders’
office, writes that when he volunteered to represent inmates at Guantánamo Bay
he didn’t know if his clients “would be terrorists or innocents.”
At least one,
Adel Hamad, a Sudanese aid worker, seems patently innocent, and Wax also
represented Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer whose story—he was falsely linked to a
bombing through shoddy fingerprint evidence—illustrates the short path from
depriving terrorists of their rights to depriving everyone else. In an
enthralling, enraging narrative, Wax captures the damage that Guantánamo has
done to America’s reputation abroad, and shows how the legal fights on behalf
of detainees might restore it. When Hamad, who helped run a hospital for
refugees and was known for his Ping-Pong skills, disappeared, his wife was left
destitute, and their infant daughter died from a lack of medical care. Hamad
spent nearly five years at Guantánamo. ♦
Noted by The
New Yorker
