New book out: "Kafka Comes to America"

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 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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/30/AR2008073002736.html

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.

Perhaps the earliest argument mounted in defense of fingerprinting was "the fingerprint examiner's fallacy" (Cole 2004). Fingerprint proponents reasoned that if all human fingerprint patterns are unique (itself no more than an assumption, though a plausible one), fingerprint identification must be 100 percent accurate. The fallacy is seductive: although it might be argued that at least one thinker recognized the fallacy early on (Faulds 1905), it took nearly a century before even sophisticated minds were able to shake free of it (Stoney 1997; Woodworth 1997). Nonetheless, once considered carefully, the flaw in reasoning is obvious. One cannot infer the reliability of a source-attribution technique solely from the rarity of the target object.