Detainees in America: The Next Chapter

SPEAKER BIOS

Joshua Dratel is an attorney in New York City, and practices criminal defense law in the state and federal courts.  In his 28 years as a lawyer, his practice has included a wide range of matters, including “white collar,” “organized crime,” drugs, sex offenses, and capital cases.  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 written and lectured widely on terrorism issues, including torture, the USA PATRIOT Act, the Classified Information Procedures Act, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and his articles on some of those subjects have appeared in the CARDOZO PUBLIC LAW, POLICY AND ETHICS JOURNAL and the NEW YORK LAW SCHOOL LAW REVIEW.  He has appeared on panels, and on ABC 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 Press:  2008).  He is a 1978 Magna Cum Laude graduate of Columbia College, and a 1981 graduate of Harvard Law School.

Jonathan Hafetz is a Staff Attorney in the ACLU’s National Security Project.  Mr. Hafetz has helped coordinate the Guantánamo detainee habeas corpus litigation since its earliest stages. He is counsel in Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli, a landmark case challenging the indefinite military detention of a lawful resident alien arrested in the United States. He also served as co-counsel in Munaf v. Geren and Omar v. Geren, cases involving U.S. citizens detained in Iraq that were decided by the Supreme Court in 2008. Mr. Hafetz writes and lectures widely about national security issues, has testified before Congress as an expert on habeas corpus and is a frequent commentator on national security issues. Mr. Hafetz previously served as Litigation Director for the Liberty and National Security Project of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. He also formerly served as a Gibbons Fellow in Public Interest and Constitutional Law at Gibbons, P.C., and as a law clerk to the Hon. Jed S. Rakoff, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and Sandra L. Lynch, U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. 

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 , 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 served as the co-chair to then Governor Eliot Spitzer’s Homeland Security transition committee, where she advised the Governor-Elect on the major challenges facing New York 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.