"I had read Solzhenitzyn's The Gulag Archipelago with its description of the nighttime arrests of Soviet dissidents and the rough life in the Soviet labor camps. I had taken a course in law school on comparative law that described the sham of the Soviet legal system. Now I was sitting in the county jail in Portland, Oregon, actually telling a client that he might disappear and we were even planning for the possibility. I had to question what was going on in my country. Were the president and attorney general that afraid? Did they have such little faith in the strength of our legal system? I could not have guessed, sitting there with Brandon, that two years later I would be in an American gulag in Guantanamo Bay representing men who had been "disappeared" and held without charges or trial for more than four years."