Today’s Terrorist Threat: An Assessment

Speaker Bios

Rand Beers served as the National Security adviser to the Kerry-Edwards 2004 campaign. Previously he spent 35 years as a senior civil servant. After serving as a Marine officer and rifle company commander in Vietnam, he entered the Foreign Service in 1971 and the Civil Service in 1983. From 1988-98, Mr. Beers served on the National Security Council Staff at the White House as Director for Counter-terrorism and Counter-narcotics, Director for Peacekeeping, and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs. From 1998-2003 he was Assistant Secretary of State for International. Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. In 2002-03 he was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Combating Terrorism. In 2002-03 he was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Combating Terrorism at the National Security Council. Beers earned a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A. from the University of Michigan.

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.

Lawrence Wright is a Fellow at the Center on Law and Security and an author and screenwriter, as well as a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine.  His book on Al Qaeda, The Looming Tower (Knopf, 2006), in addition to being named one of the top ten books of 2006, according to both the New York Times and the Washington Post, and nominated for the 2006 National Book Award, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for General non fiction. 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.