CIA Interrogations and the Bin Laden Operation

Elisa Massimino is the president and CEO of Human Rights First, one of the country’s leading human-rights advocacy organizations. She was instrumental in its recent effort to assemble a group of retired generals and admirals to speak out publicly against policies authorizing the torture of prisoners in US custody. Ms. Massimino joined Human Rights First as a staff attorney in 1991 and served as its Washington director from 1997 to 2008. Previously, she was a litigator in private practice at the Washington law firm Hogan & Hartson, where she was pro bono counsel in many human-rights cases. Before joining the legal profession, she taught philosophy at several universities in Michigan. Ms. Massimino is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, where she teaches human-rights advocacy, and has taught international human-rights law at the University of Virginia and refugee law at the George Washington University School of Law. She is also a member of the bar of the US Supreme Court. As a national authority on human-rights law and policy, Ms. Massimino has testified before Congress dozens of times and writes frequently for mainstream publications and specialized journals. She appears regularly in major media outlets and speaks to audiences around the country. In May 2008, the influential Washington newspaper the Hill named her one of the top twenty public advocates in the country.

Michael B. Mukasey recently served as the eighty-first US attorney general, the country’s chief law-enforcement officer. As attorney general from November 2007 to January 2009, he oversaw the Department of Justice and advised on critical issues of domestic and international law. Judge Mukasey also served for eighteen years as a judge of the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, including six years as chief judge. He is the recipient of several awards, most notably the Learned Hand Medal of the Federal Bar Council. Judge Mukasey joined the international law firm Debevoise & Plimpton as a partner in the litigation practice in New York in February 2009. He focuses his practice on internal investigations, independent board reviews, and corporate governance.

John Rizzo is the former acting general counsel at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and spent thirty-four years in the CIA’s Office of General Counsel. From 2001 to 2002 and from 2004 to 2009, he was the chief legal officer at the CIA and dealt with the most challenging legal issues in the post-9/11 era. During that time, Mr. Rizzo was responsible for all legal matters at the CIA, including national security and international law, administrative and contract law, and criminal and civil litigation. Also during his tenure, he was the deputy director for the Office of Congressional Affairs and the principal interlocutor with the House and Senate congressional committees investigating the Iran-Contra affair. Early in his career, Mr. Rizzo was the principal drafter of the CIA regulations for the conduct of intelligence activities in the United States–regulations that remain in effect today. He was the recipient of the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, the highest recognition accorded to a career CIA officer. In 1996, he won the Tom C. Clark Award from the Federal Bar Association as the most outstanding lawyer in government; to date, he is the only Intelligence Community attorney to receive the award. Mr. Rizzo is senior counsel in the Washington office of Steptoe & Johnson LLP, where he is a member of the national and homeland security practice and of the firm’s international department. He is also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor after Guantanamo (Brookings Institution Press, 2010) and Law and the Long War: The Future of Justice in the Age of Terror (Penguin Press, June 2008), and the editor of Legislating the War on Terror: An Agenda for Reform (Brookings Institution Press, 2009). He cofounded and cowrites the Lawfare blog, which is devoted to nonideological discussion of the “hard national security choices,” and is a member of the Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security and Law. Between 1997 and 2006, he was an editorial writer for the Washington Post specializing in legal affairs. Before joining the editorial-page staff, Mr. Wittes covered the Department of Justice and federal regulatory agencies as a reporter and news editor at Legal Times. His writing has also appeared in a wide range of journals and magazines, including Slate, the New Republic, Wilson Quarterly, the Weekly Standard, Policy Review, and First Things.