Closing Guantanamo: The Diplomatic Challenge

Peter Ahearn served two years as a Senior Advisor with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), following a twenty-nine year career with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  In this role, he was responsible for assisting the ODNI in the area of National Intelligence integration, Human Intelligence policy, providing guidance on Homeland Security, National Security and law enforcement intelligence programs, National Intelligence budget, and Congressional intelligence oversight matters.

Prior to his retirement from the FBI in March 2006, Mr. Ahearn served in a variety of positions of increasing responsibility.  After several years investigating White Collar Crime, Violent Crime, International Drugs and Organized Crime groups, Terrorism and National Security matters in Pittsburgh, PA and Newark, NJ, he was promoted to Supervisor of the Newark, New Jersey, Division’s Organized Crime/Drug Program, where he remained until his transfer to FBI Headquarters in May 1991. There he assumed national/international program management responsibility for the FBI’s International Organized Crime operations, as well as served as an Assistant Inspector in the FBI’s Inspection Division. He was promoted again in January 1996, as the FBI Liaison Representative to the Office of International Affairs, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., with collateral duties as the FBI Liaison Representative to the Office of National Drug Control Policy from January 1996 through July 1996.

In July 1996, Mr. Ahearn received an appointment as Assistant Special Agent in Charge (ASAC) of the FBI’s San Diego, California, Division, with program responsibility for the Organized Crime/Drug and Violent Crime/Major Offender investigative programs, closely coordinating with Mexican authorities on matters of mutual concern.  On July 20, 1998, the Bureau promoted Mr. Ahearn to the Senior Executive Service (SES) and assigned to a joint duty assignment as the Deputy Assistant Administrator of Intelligence for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), managing DEA’s domestic and international analytical program.

In March 2001, the Bureau appointed Mr. Ahearn to the position of Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the Buffalo, New York, Division, which was recognized during his tenure with multiple Director’s Awards, Attorney General’s Awards, and the Service to America Award for its work in the “Lackawanna Six” international terrorism case and James Charles Kopp anti-abortion terrorist and Teamster Local 91 RICO prosecution in Niagara Falls, NY. Oversaw close coordination and liaison with Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agency counterparts. Mr. Ahearn graduated from Rutgers University in 1976 with a degree in Business Administration and Accounting.  He owns and operates Ahearn Consulting, LLC in the Washington, D.C. area, a company that provides expertise on National Security and Law Enforcement matters.

Bernard Haykel is Professor of Near Eastern Studies and Director of The Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, at Princeton University.He was formerly associate professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern History in New York University’s Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.  Haykel’s primary research interests center on Islamic political movements and legal thought. He has published extensively on the Salafi movement in both its pre-modern and modern manifestations. In particular, his book entitled Revival and Reform in Islam (Cambridge University Press, 2003) explores this strand of Islamic legal and political thought. He is presently writing a book on the religious politics of Saudi Arabia since the early 1950s.

Steven Simon is the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the Goldman Sachs visiting professor in public policy at Princeton University. Prior to joining CFR, Mr. Simon specialized in Middle Eastern affairs at the RAND Corporation. He came to RAND from London, where he was the deputy director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) and Carol Deane senior fellow in U.S. security studies. Before moving to Britain in 1999, Mr. Simon served at the White House for over five years as director for global issues and senior director for transnational threats. During this period, he was involved in U.S. counterterrorism policy and operations as well as security policy in the Near East and South Asia. These assignments followed a fifteen year career at the U.S. Department of State.

Mr. Simon is the author of the February 2007 Council Special Report “After the Surge: The Case for U.S. Military Disengagement from Iraq.” He is the coauthor of The Age of Sacred Terror (Random House, 2002), which won the Council on Foreign Relations 2004 Arthur Ross Book Award, and coeditor of Iraq at the Crossroads: State and Society in the Shadow of Regime Change (Oxford University Press/IISS, 2003). He is also the coauthor of Building a Successful Palestinian State (Rand Corporation, 2005) and The Arc: A Formal Structure for a Palestinian State (Rand Corporation, 2005). Most recently, he coauthored The Next Attack (Henry Holt, 2005), which examines the evolution of the jihad since September 11, 2001, and America’s response, and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize in 2006. He is working on a new book, with Daniel Benjamin, on Muslim integration in Europe. Mr. Simon has published in Time, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Times, Foreign Affairs, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books, Survival, the National Interest, World Policy Journal, and other journals. He is a frequent guest on CNN, BBC, ABC, 60 Minutes, Nightline, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Fox, and NPR. Mr. Simon has a BA from Columbia University in classics and Near Eastern languages, an MTS from the Harvard Divinity School, and an MPA from Princeton University. He was a university fellow at Brown University and an international affairs fellow at Oxford University.

Matthew Waxman is associate professor of law at Columbia Law School and adjunct senior fellow for law and U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and a former international affairs fellow at CFR.
He previously served as principal deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning staff, deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, director for contingency planning and international justice at the National Security Council, and special assistant to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

Mr. Waxman is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School and studied international relations as a Fulbright scholar in the United Kingdom. After law school, he served as law clerk to Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter and U.S. Court of Appeals judge Joel M. Flaum. He is a member of the Hoover Institution Task Force on national security and law, and his publications include The Dynamics of Coercion: American Foreign Policy and the Limits of Military Might (Cambridge University Press, 2002) (with D. Byman).

MODERATOR

Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security. She is the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First 100 Days (Oxford University Press). She is also editor of the NYU Review of Law and Security, co-editor of the Center’s newest publication, The Enemy Combatants Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, August 2008), The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, and editor of the books Al Qaeda Now and The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge University Press).

She previously taught courses in the European Studies Department at New York University. She is a former Vice-President of the Soros Foundation/Open Society Institute and the founding director of the Program in International Education.  Most recently she served as the co-chair to Governor Eliot Spitzer’s Homeland Security transition committee, where she advised the Governor-Elect, Lieutenant Governor-Elect and the transition team on the major challenges facing the state. She is a frequent writer and commentator on terrorism, international law, the war on terror, and detainee issues.  Her work has been featured in The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, The American Prospect, and on major news channels.  She has served as a consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the NY Council for the Humanities, the NYC Board of Education and USAID.