We Americans like "up close and personal" stories, at least if they're about athletes, celebrities, inspirational figures or the like. Yet it may be another story if we're talking about getting up close and personal with those our government accuses of being terrorists. Yet many of those stories are ones we probably need to hear.

Steven T. Wax, the head of the federal public defender's office in Portland, Oregon, gives us such a look — in Kafka Comes to America: Fighting for Justice in the War on Terror — through the prism of what happened to two of his clients. One, Brandon Mayfield, made headlines across the country. He is the Portland lawyer who the FBI claimed a fingerprint tied to the March 2004 Madrid train bombings. The other is unknown to probably 99 percent of Americans. Adel Hamad is a Sudanese national who worked for an international Muslim non-governmental organization as a hospital administrator in Pakistan. He was hauled from his Peshawar apartment to a Pakistani prison and eventually flown in chains to the United States military prison in Guantanamo Bay, labeled and detained as an enemy combatant.

The two stories serve as excellent bookends for the ramifications of the policies and practices the U.S. has employed in the so-called War on Terror. Mayfield's story shows the impact of the Patriot Act and a tendency to rush to judgment in terrorism cases on a relatively average American citizen and family. Hamad's story shows the Kafkaesque limbo in which some innocent foreign civilians have been left for years. Both stories are frightening.

Wax's office was appointed to represent Mayfield shortly after he was arrested as a "material witness" in the Madrid bombings by the FBI. It is, in large part, a story of a process dictated in large part by Washington, D.C., that went amok. The FBI looked at a fingerprint provided by Spanish authorities that was found on a plastic bag containing detonators and concluded with "100 percent certainty" that was Mayfield's. It certainly didn't help that Mayfield had converted to Islam from Christianity, handled a variety of immigration matters for Muslims and Middle Eastern natives, and represented an accused terrorist in a child custody proceeding.

The FBI's suspicions led to "sneak-and-peek" searches (made without notice or a warrant) of Mayfield's home, including taking DNA swabs and making copies of home computer hard drives; obtaining bank and other information via "national security letters," which the recipients are legally forbidden to say they received; surveillance of his daily activities; and, wiretaps and electronic eavesdropping of his home. Federal terrorism officials were not dissuaded when Spanish authorities told the FBI on April 13, 2004, that their comparison of the fingerprint to Mayfield's was "NEGATIVE." Instead, the FBI concluded that since "[t]he problem is there is not enough other evidence to arrest him on a criminal charge," it would arrest him as a material witness. In other words, Mayfield would be held without charges being lodged against him while the government continued to investigate and sought to force him to give a statement to them under oath or testify before a grand jury.