Each year the Center on Law and Security awards a number of Fellowships.  The Center’s Fellows are experts pulled from a variety of fields including journalism, foreign policy, criminal law enforcement and academia.  The Center provides a forum for these experts to connect, believing that a diverse class of Fellows allows for international dialogue and networking among practitioners who normally would not have access to one another.  The Fellows are fully integrated into the Center’s ongoing work and are expected to make a substantive contribution to it.  The Center maintains ties to Fellows after their tenures at the Center have ended in order to broaden its network of experts and follow up on the work they started here. 

2007-2008 Fellows

Peter Bergen

Peter Bergen is a Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C., an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, CNN's terrorism analyst and the author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Bin Laden.  His most recent book is The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda's Leader.

Sidney Blumenthal

Sidney Blumenthal is currently a Fellow at the Center on Law and Security. A former senior advisor to President Clinton and author of The Clinton Wars, he is a columnist for the Guardian of London and was recently Washington bureau chief of Salon.com. 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.

Paul Cruickshank

Paul Cruickshank is a Fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University’s School of Law. 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.

Bart Gellman

Bart Gellman is a Pulitzer Prize winning national correspondent on leave
from The Washington Post. He is researching and writing a book for
Penguin Press on Vice President Cheney, expanding on his "Angler" series
in The Post (www.washingtonpost.com/cheney).

Tara McKelvey

Tara McKelvey is a Research 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.

Nir Rosen

Nir Rosen is a writer, journalist, film-maker and Fellow at the Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law. He has spent over 36 months working in occupied Iraq, four months in Afghanistan and has also worked in Somalia, the Congo, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon, where he lives with his wife and son. His work has been published by the New York Times Magazine, the New Yorker Magazine, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone Magazine, and similar publications. He has filmed for several documentaries. One of them, "No End in Sight," about the occupation of Iraq, recently won a prize at the Sundance Film Festival. His book on Iraq, "In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq," was published by Free Press in 2006 and is being released as an updated paperback in the spring of 2008. His next book, on Iraq and the impact of the US war on the region will be released in late 2008. Rosen recently returned from three months in Baghdad where he filmed a documentary for British Channel 4. He is a frequent guest on CNN, CNN International, al Jazeera International and various other television and radio shows.

Michael Sheehan

Michael Sheehan comes to the Center on Law and Security from his position as Deputy Commissioner of Counterterrorism for the New York City Police Department. Commissioner Sheehan is best known for his work in the fields of counterterrorism at the local, national and international levels. Prior to his position at the NYPD,  Sheehan  was appointed by Kofi Annan as the United Nations Assistant Secretary General in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, where he was responsible for oversight of military and police peacekeeping forces around the world. Commissioner Sheehan's counterterrorism record extends back to the 1990s, when, following the embassy bombings in East Africa, he became the Department of State's Ambassador at Large for Counterterrorism. Upon retiring from the Army as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1997, Sheehan was appointed a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of International Organizations, where he focused on international policing in Bosnia and Kosovo. He has served under three National Security Advisors and two Presidents (George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton). He holds a B.A. from West Point, an M.A. from Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and an M.A. from the U.S. Army Command/General Staff College.

Commissioner Sheehan will be a Distinguished Fellow at the Center from May 2006 through the next academic year.  This fellowship is intended to allow a leading public official in the field of counterterrorism to work with the Director of the Center on programming, to convene policy groups and to help with the Center’s publications for the duration of one year.  The Director and Commissioner Sheehan are planning to co-edit a publication entitled For the Record, which will present non-partisan formal analyses of major security issues and policies, including port security, the Patriot Act, critical infrastructure, foreign investment and more.  In addition, Commissioner Sheehan will help plan and participate in the yearly scheduling of the Center’s conferences, open forums and distinguished speaker series.

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.  Currently he is working on a script for MGM about John O'Neill, the former head of the FBI's office of counterterrorism in New York, who died on 9/11.

ALUMNI FELLOWS

Amos Elon

Amos Elon is an acclaimed historian and social critic and is the author of eight widely praised books on Germany, Jewish history, and the Middle East, including Founder: A Portrait of the First Rothschild and the New York Times bestseller, Israelis: Founders and Sons. He is a former foreign correspondent (in Washington, Paris, Bonn, and Cairo) and political columnist for Haaretz. He studied law and history in Israel and England. In Israel he was an early advocate for withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967 and the establishment of a Palestinian state. He has appeared many times on the Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning and 60 Minutes. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and The New York Review of Books, he divides his time between Jerusalem and Tuscany.

Judge Baltasar Garzón

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.

Dana Priest

Dana Priest covers the intelligence community and national security issues on The Post’s National staff and is an analyst for NBC News. In her 20 years at The Post, she has written extensively on the military, counterterrorism and the CIA. In 2007, she and a colleague broke the outpatient-care scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. She has covered military action in Panama, Iraq and Kosovo, and has traveled widely with Army Special Forces and infantry around the world.

In 2006 she received a number of honors for reporting on CIA secret prisons and counterterrorism operations, including the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting, the George Polk Award and the Overseas Press Club award. Dana’s 2003 book, “The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace With America’s Military,” was a finalist for the Pulitzer. In 2004, she was a Pulitzer finalist twice, for reporting on clandestine intelligence, and for her contribution to The Post’s articles on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Dana graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a degree in political science.