Fellows

Peter Bergen

Peter Bergen is a print and television journalist, and the author of, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda (2011),  Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (2001), which has been translated into 18 languages and The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda's Leader (2006). Both books were named among the best non-fiction books of the year by The Washington Post, and documentaries based on the books were nominated for Emmys in 2002 and 2007. Mr. Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a fellow at New York University's Center on Law & Security, and director of the national security studies program at the New America Foundation. He has written for many publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Rolling Stone, The National Interest, TIME, Washington Monthly, The Nation, Mother Jones, Washington Times, The Times (UK), The Daily Telegraph (UK), and The Guardian (UK). He is a contributing editor at The New Republic and has worked as a correspondent for National Geographic television, Discovery and CNN. In 2008 he was an adjunct lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and he worked as an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University for several years. He has testified on Capitol Hill on a number of occasions. Mr. Bergen holds an M.A. in modern history from New College, Oxford University. 

Sidney Blumenthal

Sidney Blumenthal is currently a Fellow at the Center on Law and Security and former senior advisor to President Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. He is a columnist for the Guardian of London and was recently Washington bureau chief of Salon.com. Blumenthal was the executive producer of the documentary, "Taxi to the Dark Side," directed by Alex Gibney, that won the Oscar for best documentary of 2007 at the Academy Awards. He is the author of The Clinton Wars and most recently The Strange Death of Republican America. Other books by Blumenthal include The Permanent Campaign, The Rise of the Counterestablishment, Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War, and the recently published How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime (Princeton University Press, 2006).

Peter Clarke

Peter Clarke is a Fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University's School of Law. He was most recently the Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations and the head of the Anti-Terrorism Branch of New Scotland Yard (UK) and the national coordinator for terrorism investigations. From 2002 until his retirement from the police in 2008 in the role of Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations, he was responsible for the conduct of all police counter terrorist operations in the United Kingdom, and worldwide where British interests were affected. From 2004 -2007 he was a member of the British government team negotiating with the government of the United States for the release of British citizens and residents from Guantanamo Bay. He attended the Royal College of Defence Studies in 2002. He was appointed Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 2001, Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2006, and awarded the Queen's Police Medal in 2003. In 2008 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Laws by the University of Bristol.

Roger Cressey

Roger Cressey is a Senior Vice President at Booz Allen. He was formerly the President and founder of Good Harbor Consulting, LLC, a security and risk management consulting firm based in Arlington, VA. Prior to starting Good Harbor, Cressey served in senior cyber security and counterterrorism positions in the Clinton and Bush Administrations. At the White House, he was the Deputy for Counterterrorism on the National Security Council staff from November 1999 to November 2001. He was responsible for the coordination and implementation of US counterterrorism policy and managed the US Government response to multiple terrorism incidents, including the Millennium terror alert, the USS COLE attack, and the September 11th attacks. For the past six years, he has been an on-air counterterrorism analyst for NBC News, appearing frequently on NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, MSNBC and CNBC. Prior to his White House service, Mr. Cressey served in the Department of Defense, where he worked on US defense strategy and the review of the Pentagon's war plans, From 1991–1995, he served in the Department of State working on Middle East security issues, including serving a member of the US delegation to the multilateral track of the Arab-Israeli peace process talks. His overseas experience includes serving as a Pol-Mil officer with the US Embassy in Israel and with UN peacekeeping operations in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. While in the former Yugoslavia, Cressey was part of a United Nations team that planned the successful capture of the first individual indicted for war crimes in Croatia. From 2001 - 2006, he taught a graduate course on U.S. counterterrorism policy at Georgetown University. He received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an M.A. in Security Policy Studies from The George Washington University. 

Paul Cruickshank

Paul Cruickshank is an alumni fellow at the Center on Law and Security. He previously worked as an investigative journalist in London, reporting on al Qaeda and its European affiliates and was part of the CNN reporting team that covered the London July 7, 2005 attacks. He collaborated closely with Peter Bergen in interviewing acquaintances of Osama bin Laden for Bergen's 2006 oral history "The Osama bin Laden I Know" and worked with CNN on a two-hour Emmy-nominated documentary “In the footsteps of bin Laden.” Cruickshank has written about al Qaeda and Islamist groups for a number of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. He has provided on-air analysis to CNN, BBC, NBC, CBS, BBC, Fox News and Al Jazeera on national security issues. Cruickshank graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in history, and has a Masters degree with Honors in International Relations from the Paul. H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University. He has also worked in the European Parliament in Brussels and at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C.

Joshua Dratel

Joshua L. Dratel is an attorney in New York City, and practices criminal defense law in the state and federal courts. Mr. Dratel has been defense counsel in several terrorism and national security prosecutions, including that of Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, who was acquitted in federal court in Idaho in 2004; Wadih El-Hage, a defendant in United States v. Usama bin Laden, which involved the August 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and Mohamed Suleiman al-Nalfi, another defendant in the Embassy Bombings case. He was also lead counsel for David Hicks, an Australian detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Mr. Hicks's prosecution by U.S. military commission, and currently represents Mohamed El-Mezain, a defendant in the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, and, for sentencing and on appeal, Lynne Stewart, a New York lawyer convicted of material support for terrorism. He is a past president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (2005). He has appeared on panels, and on ABC's Nightline, with regard to the issue of civil liberties and security in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. He is a co-author of the 2003 Supplement of Practice Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, and his articles on a variety of criminal law subjects have appeared in The Champion, The Mouthpiece, and Criminal Justice Weekly. He is co-editor with Karen J. Greenberg of The Torture Papers: The Legal Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge University Press, 2005), a compendium of government memoranda, and The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He is a 1978 Magna Cum Laude graduate of Columbia College, and a 1981 graduate of Harvard Law School.

Carol Dysinger

Carol Dysinger has been a feature film and documentary editor for the past 25 years. For her most recent documentary, Camp Victory, Afghanistan, Carol was the recipient of a Sundance Institute Grant, awarded to documentary filmmakers who explore the criticial issues of our times with highly crafted storytelling and stylistic innovation. Camp Victory, Afghanistan is the first film to examine the reality of building a functioning Afghan military-the initial critical step toward bringing stability and peace to Afghanistan. Carol's films have premiered at Sundance, Berlin, and Venice Film Festivals and have been nominated for Emmy and Academy Awards. In addition, Carol has worked as a screenwriter with scripts produced for 20th Century Fox, Disney and HBO. She is a tenured Professor of Graduate Film and New Media at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.

Judge Baltasar Garzón

Judge Baltasar Garzón is an investigating judge for Spain's National Court, where he has worked since 1998. From 2005 to 2006, he was a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Law and Security. One of his areas of expertise is the investigation of terrorism, from the Antiterrorist Liberation Groups (GAL), a paramilitary organization operating in Spain, to the terrorist organization ETA, to al Qaeda cells and Islamist terrorism in Spain. Judge Garzón has also investigated drug trafficking, organized crime, financial crimes, and crimes against humanity, including cases of torture and genocide that took place in Chile and Argentina. He ordered the arrest of Augusto Pinochet and Osama bin Laden. He is the author of various books and articles on terrorism.

Barton Gellman

Barton Gellman is a Pulitzer Prize- winning journalist, author, and senior research fellow at the Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law. He is also TIME Magazine's contributing editor at large. Bart spent over 20 years at the Washington Post, which was comprised of tours that covered diplomacy, the Middle East, the Pentagon, and the D.C. superior court. His Cheney series, with partner Jo Becker, won a 2008 Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award, and the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. Gellman also shared a Pulitzer for national reporting in 2002, and his work has been honored by the Overseas Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Gellman graduated with highest honors from Princeton University and earned a master's degree in politics at University College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author of Contending with Kennan: Toward a Philosophy of American Power. His most recent book, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency, was released in September 2008 to much acclaim.

Bernard Haykel

Bernard Haykel is professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University. He is also director of The Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia and director of the Princeton Project on Oil and Energy in the Middle East. Dr. Haykel's primary research interests center on Islamic political movements and legal thought as well as Saudi Arabia's politics and history. He has published extensively on the Salafi movement in both its premodern and modern manifestations, explored in his book Revival and Reform in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2003). He has recently completed a second book on the religious politics of Saudi Arabia since the early 1950s. Dr. Haykel holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford.

Thomas Hegghammer

Thomas Hegghammer is a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) who specialises in the study of violent Islamism. He is the author of the book Jihad in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge University Press) and the co-author of al-Qaida in its own words (Harvard University Press, 2008). Thomas Hegghammer also edits the blog Jihadica and comments frequently in international media. He is currently finishing a book about the ideologue Abdallah Azzam and the Arab fighters in 1980s Afghanistan. His next major project focuses on "jihad culture", i.e. the odd rituals and artistic productions jihadis perform in the underground when they are not fighting.

Tara McKelvey

Tara McKelvey is an alumni fellow at the Center on Law and Security. She is a senior editor at The American Prospect, a frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, and a contributing editor to Marie Claire. In addition, she is the editor of an anthology, "One of the Guys: Female Torturers and Aggressors" (Seal Press, January 2007), and the author of an upcoming book about Abu Ghraib and the detainees' fight for justice in the American courts (Carroll & Graf, April 2007). She has appeared on MSNBC, PBS, Nightline and other programs.

Brian Palmer

Brian Palmer is a writer, filmmaker and photographer, based in New York. He has worked as a freelance field producer for the Tribeca Film Festival's documentation unit and has written for Mother Jones, Newsday, Newsweek International, Aperture, The Village Voice, The City Sun, Emerge, The New York Times Magazine, US News & World Report, Entertainment Weekly, and others. His photographs have appeared in The New York Times, ColorLines, US News & World Report, Politiken (Copenhagen), and many other publications.

Dana Priest

Dana Priest is a two-time Pulitzer prize winning investigative reporter for The Washington Post. She spent three years as the Post's intelligence reporter and was Pentagon correspondent for seven years before that. Priest has received numerous awards, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Other Walter Reed and the 2006 Pulitzer for Beat Reporting for her work on CIA secret prisons and counterterrorism operations overseas. Other honors include the Robert F. Kennedy Award, George Polk Award, American Society of Newspaper Editors, Annenberg School of Communication's Selden Ring Award, the Overseas Press Club Award for interpretation of international affairs and the American Academy of Diplomacy's Award for Distinguished Reporting and Analysis on Foreign Affairs. Priest's widely acclaimed 2003 book about the military's expanding responsibility and influence, "THE MISSION: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America's Military," earned the New York Public Library Bernstein Book Award and was a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction.

Priest is also a contributor to CBS News and 60 Minutes. She is a board member of the Reporters Committee for Free of the Press. She holds a B.A. in political science from the University of California at Santa Cruz and lives in Washington, D.C.

Michael Sheehan

Michael Sheehan is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Law and Security, security consultant, and author of Crush the Cell (Crown, 2008), which he wrote during his residency at the Center. He has had a distinguished and uniquely varied career in public service for over 30 years. He is best known for his work in counterterrorism, peacekeeping and laws enforcement operations. Sheehan was the Deputy Commissioner of Counterterrorism at the NYPD from 2003 to 2006. Prior to this he was the Assistant Secretary General in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at the UN , where he was responsible for mission support to UN military and police peacekeeping forces around the world. In the late 1990s, Sheehan served as the Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of International Organizations. Sheehan served at the White House under three National Security Advisors and two Presidents (George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton). Sheehan is a retired LTC of the U.S. Army Special Forces and was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge among other decorations for his service in the Army. He holds a B.S. from the United States Military Academy at West Point and M.A. from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.

Alexandra Starr

Robert Windrem

Robert Windrem is a Research Fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security. For three decades, he worked as a producer for NBC News. During that time, he focused on issues of international security, strategic policy, intelligence and terrorism. He is the winner of more than 40 national journalism awards for his work in print, television, and online journalism, including a Columbia-duPont Award, mostly for his work on international security issues.

Lawrence Wright

Lawrence Wright is a Fellow at the Center on Law and Security, an author and screenwriter, and a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. His book on Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (Knopf, 2006), won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction and was named one of the top ten books of 2006, according to both the New York Times and the Washington Post, and was nominated for the 2006 National Book Award. A portion of that book, "The Man Behind Bin Laden," was published in The New Yorker and won the 2002 Overseas Press Club's Ed Cunningham Award for best magazine reporting. He has also won the National Magazine Award for Reporting as well as the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Magazine Journalism.