Obama and the 9/11 Trials: A Conversation on Security, Justice, and Realism

Obama and the 9/11 Trials: A Conversation on Security, Justice, and Realism

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Speaker Bios

Colonel Morris Davis served as a judge advocate in the United States Air Force from October 1983 until he retired as a Colonel in October 2008.  From September 2005 until October 2007, he was the Chief Prosecutor for the Military Commissions at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  He led a multi-agency prosecution task force of more than 100 personnel from the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other federal agencies.  For nearly two years he was one of the leading advocates for military commissions and the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.  He resigned as chief prosecutor in October 2007 because of his objection to the use of evidence obtained by torture and growing political interference in the military commissions, and he became a critic of the process he once defended.  His final assignment before retiring from the military was as the Director of the Air Force Judiciary where he oversaw the Air Force criminal justice system and supervised nearly 265 people at sites worldwide.

Morris Davis earned a BS in criminal justice from Appalachian State University, a JD from North Carolina Central University School of Law, a LLM in government procurement law from George Washington University School of Law, and a LLM in military law from the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General School.  His military decorations include the Legion of Merit, six Meritorious Service Medals, the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, and Global War on Terrorism Service Medal.  He was included in the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington report, Those Who Dared: 30 Officials Who Stood Up for Our County,in July 2008 and he received the Justice Charles E. Whittaker Award presented by the Lawyers Association of Kansas City in November 2009.

Joshua L. Dratel is an attorney in New York City, and practices criminal defense law in the state and federal courts.  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 appeared on panels, and on ABC’s 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 inThe Champion, The Mouthpiece, and Criminal Justice Weekly.  He is co-editor with Karen J. Greenberg ofThe 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 University Press, 2008). He is a 1978 Magna Cum Laude graduate of Columbia College, and a 1981 graduate of Harvard Law School.

Anthony D. Romero is the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation’s premier defender of liberty and individual freedom. He took the helm of the organization just four days before the September 11, 2001 attacks. Shortly afterward, the ACLU launched its national Safe and Free campaign to protect basic freedoms during a time of crisis. Under Romero’s leadership, the ACLU gained court victories on the Patriot Act, filed landmark litigation on the torture and abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, and filed the first successful legal challenge to the Bush administration’s illegal NSA spying program.

Romero, an attorney with a history of public-interest activism, 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 LGBT 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. For more information about the book, visit www.aclu.org/ouramerica.

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.

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.