From Act II, Chapter 4

On a Monday morning a month earlier, Stephen Abraham was sitting in his office in Newport Beach, California, going about his business. He's a neatnik--no piles on the desk--with everything for the coming week neatly stacked on a side table: a filing against a lending company he represents, another one against a landlord with some angry tenants, and an action against a pomegranate juice company, a little local one, being sued by the giant "Pom" juice conglomerate, Fijiwater, which Abraham contended seemed to claim to own the very concept of squeezing pomegranates. In his court filing, one he was particularly proud of, Abraham cited Bathsheba from the Bible--"I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate"--wondering if Fijiwater claimed ownership over her as well.

Abraham is a professional nuisance, and a good one. So is his sister. She's a lawyer, too, at a big firm on the East Coast. They're children of a Holocaust survivor, an immigrant to the United States who spent time in labor camps as a boy, and both of them are a bit zealous about parsing truth from deception, and then not budging.

His sister was, at this moment, calling him. He could see her number on the caller ID, and he knew what she wanted. But he wasn't sure he wanted to pick up. It was about his old life, one he was trying to leave behind so he could get on with just living.

But he did pick up. "Okay, okay, but how long do you think this presentation is going to go?" he asked.

"As long as you want to listen in," his sister, Susan, said. "I thought it'd be interesting for you."

He signed on to his computer and clicked on the link she had sent him, which opened a videoconference being broadcast for all fifteen offices of Susan's law firm, Pillsbury LLP. A lawyer from the firm talked for a few minutes about the firm's pro bono work representing detainees, how Pillsbury got involved and how the process of adjudication worked at Guantánamo.

Abraham watched and felt, minute by minute, that he was being drawn backward into the churning surf. . . .

Stephen Abraham is a lawyer and military intelligence reserve officer who, in 2004, was assigned to the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants (OARDEC), the military apparatus charged with reviewing the detention of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. Abraham was tasked with reviewing the intelligence on the detainees and served as a judge on a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT). The Way of the World tells the story of Abraham's experiences and of how his whistleblowing prompted the Supreme Court to hear arguably its most important case of the decade.