Two more weeks passed after the initial break-ins, weeks in which the fear and worry began to dissipate as no more incidents occurred. Then it happened -- a knock on the door around 9:30 in the morning on Thursday, May 6. People living under a host of dictatorships around the world, from Russia to Latin America to North Korea, have learned to dread the "knock on the door" from the KGB, Cheka, or Stasi. But here in America it is not something we have had to fear since the "visits" from government agents and recruitment of informers during the Communist witch hunts in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Even then, the fear was never widespread. When Brandon answered the knock on his office door in Beaverton that day, his worst nightmare turned real.
I found this in the local paper's opinion section and I found it very interesting. It's an excerpt from a book by Steven T. Wax called "Kafka Comes to America: Fighting for Justice in the War on Terror". The author, a federal public defender, provides an inside account of his representation of two men who were accused of post-9/11 terrorist activities.
The second and third excerpts will be published in the paper on July 20 and July 27, respectively.
