The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts and the War on Terror

SPEAKERS

Joshua Dratel is an attorney in New York City who practices criminal defense law in the state and federal courts.  In his 25 years as a lawyer, his practice has included a wide range of matters, including “white collar,” “organized crime,” drugs, sex offenses, and capital cases.  He is a past President of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (2005), as well as former Chair of its Amicus Curiae Committee.  He is also a Co-Chair of the Amicus Curiae Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Co-Chair of its Select Committee on Military Tribunals, and a member of its Board of Directors and Public Affairs Council .  He is a member of the Capital Punishment Committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and previously served on the Committee on Criminal Law of that organization.  He is also a member of the Board of Advisors of New York University Law School’s Center on Law & Security, and the Advisory Board of The Champion, the magazine of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.  He has represented defendants in several and national security terrorism prosecutions, 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 El-Mezain in U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation.. He was also lead and civilian counsel for David Hicks, an Australian detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Mr. Hicks’s prosecution by U.S. military commission. 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, the NEW YORK LAW SCHOOL LAW REVIEW, and the WAYNE LAW REVIEW.  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 forthcoming 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.

Karen J. Greenberg is the Executive Director of the Center on Law and Security.  She is the editor of the NYU Review of Law and Security, co-editor of The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror and The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib with Joshua Dratel, and editor of the books Al Qaeda Now and The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge University Press).  She is a former Vice-President of the Soros Foundation/Open Society Institute and the founding director of the Program in International Education.  She is a frequent writer, commentator, and lecturer on terrorism, the U.S. courts and the war on terror, global counterterrorism, and detainee issues.  Her work has been featured in the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Nation, The American Prospect, and on the major news channels.

Michael Ratner is an attorney and President of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).   He is the author of Che Guervara and the FBI: The U.S. Political Police Dossier on the Latin American Revolutionary; Against War with Iraq: An Anti-War Primer; and Guantanamo: What the World Should Know. He has also been a lecturer of international human rights litigation at the Yale Law School and the Columbia School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild, special Counsel to Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to assist in the prosecution of human rights crimes, and radio co-host for the civil rights program Law and Disorder.

Anthony Romero is executive director of the ACLU and an attorney with a history of public-interest activism. He has presided over the most successful membership growth in the ACLU’s history and more than doubled national staff and tripled the budget of the organization since he began his tenure. This unprecedented growth has allowed the ACLU to expand its nationwide litigation, lobbying and public education efforts, including new initiatives focused on racial justice, religious freedom, privacy, reproductive freedom and lesbian and gay rights.

Romero is the ACLU’s sixth executive director, and the first Latino and openly gay man to serve in that capacity. In 2005, Romero was named one of Time Magazine’s 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America, and has received dozens of public service awards and an honorary doctorate from the City University of New York School of Law.

In 2007, Romero and co-author Dina Temple-Raston published In Defense of Our America: The Fight for Civil Liberties in the Age of Terror, which takes a critical look at civil liberties in this country at a time when constitutional freedoms are in peril. Using the stories of real Americans on the frontlines of the fight for civil liberties, In Defense of Our America takes readers behind the scenes of some of the most important civil liberties cases in America to illustrate the dangerous erosion of the Bill of Rights in the age of terror.

Born in New York City to parents who hailed from Puerto Rico, Romero was the first in his family to graduate from high school. He is a graduate of Stanford University Law School and Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy and International Affairs. He is a member of the New York Bar Association and has sat on numerous nonprofit boards.