Al Qaeda Now: Networks, Strategies, Goals

Speaker Bios 

Peter Bergen is a print and television journalist; a Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington D.C; a research fellow at New York University’s Center on Law and Security and CNN’s national security analyst.

Bergen has written about al Qaeda, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and counterterrorism for a range of American newspapers and magazines including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Foreign Affairs, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, TIME, The Nation, The National Interest, Mother Jones, Washington Times and Vanity Fair. He has also written for newspapers and magazines around the world such as The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, International Herald Tribune, Prospect, El Mundo, and Die Welt. And he has worked as a correspondent for National Geographic Television, Discovery Television and CNN reporting from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia, Singapore, Yemen, Mexico and Indonesia. From 2003-2007 he taught at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 2008.

His most recent book is The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of al Qaeda’s Leader (Free Press, 2006). It was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2006 by The Washington Post. “The Osama bin Laden I Know” was translated into French, Spanish and Polish, and CNN produced a two hour documentary, “In the Footsteps of bin Laden”, based on the book. Bergen was one of the producers of the CNN documentary, which was named the best documentary of 2006 by the Society of Professional Journalists and was nominated for an Emmy. Bergen is also the author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Bin Laden. (Free Press, 2001). Holy War, Inc. was a New York Times bestseller, has been translated into eighteen languages and was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2001 by The Washington Post. A documentary based on Holy War, Inc., which aired on National Geographic Television, was nominated for an Emmy in 2002. Bergen was the recipient of the 2000 Leonard Silk Journalism Fellowship and was the Pew Journalist in Residence at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in2001 while writingHoly War, Inc. Bergen has a M.A. in Modern History from New College, Oxford University.
Roger Cressey is the President and founder of Good Harbor Consulting, LLC, a security and risk management consulting firm based in Arlington, VA and a fellow at The Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law.  Prior to starting Good Harbor, Roger 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 and MSNBC.  He is also regularly interviewed on radio and is quoted in US and international media publications.

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.  Roger’s overseas experience includes serving as a political military officer with the US Embassy in Israel and with UN peacekeeping operations in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.   While in the former Yugoslavia, he 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.  Roger 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.  He is the recipient of the State Department’s Meritorious and Superior Honor Awards and the Defense Department’s Exceptional Civilian Service Award.

Thomas Hegghammer is an academic specializing in the study of violent Islamism. He is currently a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, an associate at Harvard Kennedy School and a senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) in Oslo. He holds a PhD in political science from Sciences-Po in Paris and an MA and MPhil in Middle Eastern Studies from Oxford University. A fluent Arabic speaker, Dr. Hegghammer has conducted extensive field research in the Middle East. His research focuses on jihadi ideology, jihadism on the Arabian Peninsula and the history of the foreign fighter phenomenon. He is the author of the forthcoming book Jihad in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge University Press) and the co-author of al-Qaida in its own words (Harvard University Press, 2008). He is currently working on a book about the jihadi ideologue Abdallah Azzam and Arab involvement in the 1980s war in Afghanistan. Thomas also edits Jihadica, a blog devoted to the analysis of jihadi websites (a Technorati top 100 blog in world politics).
Evan Kohlmann is a private sector International Terrorism Consultant who has spent over a decade tracking Al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations.  During the course of his research, Mr. Kohlmann has amassed one of the largest and most extensive open source databases in the world of original documents, communiqués, and multimedia.  He currently works as a senior investigator for the Nine Eleven Finding Answers (NEFA) Foundation–and has also served at various times as a contract consultant in terrorism matters on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Office of the High Representative (OHR) in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTFY) at the Hague, the Australian Federal Police (AFP), the U.K. Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), Scotland Yard’s SO-15 Counter Terrorism Command, the Central Scotland Police, West Yorkshire Police, and the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET).

Moderator

Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law.  She is the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days (Oxford University Press, 2009), which was selected as one of the best books of 2009 by The Washington Post and Slate.com. She is co-editor with Joshua L. Dratel of The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge University Press, 2005), editor of the books The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and Al Qaeda Now (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and editor of the NYU Review of Law and Security.  Her work is featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, The National Interest, Mother Jones, TomDispatch.com, and on major news channels.  She is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations.