Speaker biographies
Max Boot is a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also a weekly foreign affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. His areas of expertise include national security; military technology; military history; U.S. foreign policy; terrorism and guerrilla warfare; terrorism; and the media. Before joining the Council in October 2002, Mr. Boot spent eight years as a writer and editor at the Wall Street Journal, and his last five years there as editorial features editor. From 1992–94, he was an editor and writer at the Christian Science Monitor. His most recent book, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power (Basic Books, 2002), was selected as one of the best books of 2002 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor. It also won the 2003 General Wallace M. Greene Jr. Award, given annually by the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation for the best nonfiction book pertaining to Marine Corps history. His next book, War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, will be published in October 2006 by Gotham Books.
Karlyn H. Bowman is a resident fellow at AEI. She joined the Institute in 1979 and was managing editor of Public Opinion magazine until 1990. From 1990 to 1995, she was the editor of The American Enterprise, the Institute’s flagship magazine. In 2002, she inaugurated AEI’s Public Opinion Studies, which include “America after 9/11” and “Attitudes toward Homosexuality and Gay Marriage,” and are available on AEI’s website She contributed a chapter on polling to The Permanent Campaign and Its Future (AEI-Brookings, 2001), and is a contributing author to The Neocon Reader.
Clark Kent Ervin is director of the Aspen Institute’s Homeland Security Initiative. Before joining the institute, he served as the first inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Prior to his service at DHS, he served as the inspector general of the Department of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governors. His service in the current administration is preceded by his service as the associate director of policy in the White House Office of National Service in the administration of President George H. W. Bush. A native Houstonian, he served in the state government of Texas from 1995 to 2001, first as assistant secretary of state and then as a deputy attorney general. He has practiced law twice in the private sector, with the Houston-based firms of Vinson & Elkins, and Locke, Liddell, & Sapp. In addition to his work at the Aspen Institute, Mr. Ervin is an on-air analyst and contributor at CNN, where he focuses on homeland security, national security, and intelligence issues. He is the author of Open Target: Where America Is Vulnerable to Attack (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Mr. Ervin is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Association of Rhodes Scholars.
David Gordon is assistant deputy director for intelligence in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). Dr. Gordon was named vice chairman of the Council in June 2004. Previously, he served as director of the CIA's Office of Transnational Issues (OTI), an office that covers a broad array of critical national security issues, including global energy and economic security, corruption and illicit financial activity, foreign denial and deception programs, and societal and humanitarian conflicts. Dr. Gordon joined the CIA in May 1998, when he was appointed National Intelligence Officer for Economics and Global Issues on the NIC. He directed major analytic projects on country-level economic and financial crises, emerging infectious disease risks, global demographic trends, and the changing geopolitics of energy, as well as provided leadership for the NIC's seminal Global Trends 2015 report. Prior to his earlier service on the NIC, Dr. Gordon was senior fellow and director of the U.S. Policy Program at the Overseas Development Council. He also served as a senior staff member on the International Relations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives; and as the regional economic policy advisor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, based in Nairobi, Kenya. Dr. Gordon is an adjunct professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He has also taught at the College of William and Mary, Princeton University, and the University of Nairobi.
Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar in defense and security policy studies at AEI.
His book Finding the Target (Encounter Books), an examination of American military transformation, will come out later this year. Previously an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he is the coauthor of While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). A contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, he has also written numerous articles on defense and foreign policy issues for Foreign Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Policy Review, Commentary, Parameters, and other periodicals.
Stuart Levey is the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. He also oversees the Treasury Department’s newly created Office of Intelligence and Analysis, ensuring that actionable intelligence is available to key decision-makers and that the department is fully integrated within the broader intelligence community. Mr. Levey was formerly the principal associate deputy attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice, responsible for coordinating the Justice Department’s varied counterterrorism activities, including investigations, intelligence collection, and prosecutions. He also served as the Justice Department’s representative to the interagency Terrorist Financing Policy Coordinating Committee and to the National Security Council’s Counterterrorism Security Group. He has served as an associate deputy attorney general and as the deputy attorney general’s chief of staff. Prior to joining the Justice Department in 2001, Mr. Levey spent eleven years in private practice at the Washington law firm Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin LLP. From 1999 to 2000, Mr. Levey served as the chief of the Washington office of former Senator Danforth’s special counsel investigation into possible government misconduct related to the standoff at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. He also clerked for Judge Laurence Silberman on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit from 1989 through 1990.
Heather Mac Donald is a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor to City Journal. She also is a recipient of the 2005 Bradley Prize for Outstanding Intellectual Achievement. Heather’s work canvasses a range of topics, including homeland security, immigration, policing, and racial profiling. Ms. Mac Donald’s book The Burden of Bad Ideas details the effects of the sixties’ counterculture’s destructive march through America’s institutions. Her latest book, Are Cops Racist? investigates the workings of the police, the controversy over so-called racial profiling, and the antiprofiling lobbies’ harmful effects on black Americans. A nonpracticing lawyer, Ms. Mac Donald has clerked for the Honorable Stephen Reinhardt, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and has been an attorney-advisor in the Office of the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In 1998, she was appointed to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s task force on the City University of New York. She was presented with the New Jersey State Law Enforcement Officers Association’s Civilian Valor Award in 2004.
Michael O'Hanlon is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he specializes in U.S. defense strategy, the use of military force, homeland security and American foreign policy. He is a visiting lecturer at Princeton University, and a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Council on Foreign Relations. O’Hanlon’s latest book is Defense Strategy for the Post-Saddam Era (Brookings, 2005). He also recently completed The Future of Arms Control (Brookings, 2005), co-authored with Michael Levi. In 2002, O'Hanlon and seven colleagues wrote Protecting the American Homeland and the subsequent Protecting the Homeland 2006/2007. O’Hanlon’s other works include Defense Policy Choices for the Bush Administration (Brookings, 2002); and Defending America: The Case for National Missile Defense (Brookings, 2001), co-authored with James Lindsay. His major articles include “Iraq Without a Plan,” Policy Review (January 2005); "Clinton’s Strong Defense Legacy,” Foreign Affairs, (November/December 2003); and "A Flawed Masterpiece: Assessing the Afghanistan Campaign," Foreign Affairs (May/June 2002). O'Hanlon was an analyst at the Congressional Budget Office from 1989-1994. He also worked previously at the Institute for Defense Analyses.
Danielle Pletka is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Her research areas include the Middle East (including Iran, Iraq, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), South Asia (India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan), terrorism, and weapons proliferation. While at AEI, Ms. Pletka has developed a conference series on rebuilding post-Saddam Iraq, a project on democracy for the Arab world, a roundtable of experts to discuss global energy security, and a project to develop bilateral relations between India and the United States. She recently served as a member of the Congressionally mandated Task Force on the United Nations, established by the United States Institute of Peace. Before coming to AEI, she served for ten years as a senior professional staff member for the Near East and South Asia on the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Ms. Pletka has also been a journalist based in Washington and the Middle East.
Robert Powell is the Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on war, international conflict, and the politics of weakly institutionalized states, and he is a specialist in game-theoretic approaches to these issues. His published work includes Nuclear Deterrence Theory: The Search for Credibility (Cambridge University Press, 1990), In the Shadow of Power: States and Strategies in International Politics (Princeton University Press, 1999), “Bargaining and Fighting While Learning,” in the American Journal of Political Science (April 2004), and “The Inefficient Use of Power: Costly Conflict with Complete Information), in American Political Science Review (May 2004).
Jeremy Rabkin is a professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University, where he teaches American Constitutional law, international law, and the history of political thought. He is also a member of AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers. He is the author of The Case for Sovereignty (AEI Press, 2004) and Law without Nations? (Princeton, 2005). His writings, in both scholarly and journalistic forums, have covered a range of topics affecting civil liberties and national security. He serves on the board of directors of the Center for Individual Rights, a public interest law firm in Washington, D.C.
Gary J. Schmitt is a resident scholar and director of AEI’s Program on Advanced Strategic Studies. Prior to coming to AEI, he helped found and served as executive director of the Project for the New American Century. In the early 1980s, Dr. Schmitt was a member of the professional staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and, from 1982–84, served as the committee’s minority staff director. In 1984, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the post of executive director of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. He served in that position until 1988. He has since held visiting fellowships at The National Interest and the Brookings Institution, served as coordinator for the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence’s Working Group on Intelligence Reform, and worked as a consultant to the Department of Defense. In addition, he has been an adjunct professor at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
Richard H. Shultz Jr., is the director of the International Security Studies Program and associate professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts Univesrity. He has been Olin Distinguished Professor of National Security Studies, U.S. Military Academy; Secretary of the Navy Senior Research Fellow, U.S. Naval War College; and research fellow, Hoover Institution of War, Revolution and Peace, Stanford University. His books include The Soviet Union and Revolutionary Warfare and The Secret War against Hanoi.
Senator Fred Thompson was elected to the United States Senate in 1994 where he served as chairman of the Committee on Governmental Affairs from 1997 until 2002. He also served on the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He chose not to run for re-election in 2002. Prior to his election, Sen. Thompson maintained law offices in Nashville and Washington. Earlier in his career, he served as an assistant United States attorney in Tennessee. In 1973, he was appointed by Senator Howard Baker to serve as Minority Counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee where he first gained national attention. Sen. Thompson first appeared on screen in the film “Marie” in 1985, portraying himself in the fact-based story of a high-profile public corruption case he handled in Tennessee. Since then, he has appeared in numerous movies and television programs, including the features “In the Line of Fire,” “Die Hard II,” and “The Hunt for Red October,” and the television series “China Beach,” “Wiseguy,” and “Matlock.” He is a regular on the long-running TV drama, “Law & Order,” and is a special program host & senior analyst for ABC News Radio. Sen. Thompson is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the U.S.-China Economic & Security Review Commission and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the chairman of the Arms Control & Nonproliferation Advisory Board.
John Yoo is a visiting scholar at AEI and a professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall), where he has taught since 1993. From 2001–03, Mr. Yoo served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel of the U.S. Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs, national security, and the separation of powers. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995–96, where he advised on Constitutional issues and judicial nominations. Mr. Yoo was an articles editor of the Yale Law Journal and, after graduating from law school, clerked for Judge Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia Circuit. He joined the Boalt faculty in 1993, and then clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court. Professor Yoo has published articles on foreign affairs, national security, and Constitutional law in a number of the nation’s leading law journals, and is the author of The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11 (University of Chicago Press, 2005) and War by Other Means (Grove/Atlantic Press, forthcoming 2006).
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