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Carol Atkinson (speaker) retired as a lieutenant colonel from the U.S. Air Force in 2005. While in the military she served in a wide variety of management and operational positions in the fields of intelligence, targeting, and combat assessment. During the Cold War she flew on the Strategic Air Command's nuclear airborne command post as a target analyst. During Operation Desert Storm (1991) she worked on the intelligence staff in Riyadh, and, subsequently, on the contingency planning staff in Dhahran/Khobar, Saudi Arabia. While in the military, she taught at the Air Force Academy and the Air Force's Command and Staff College.

Atkinson holds a PhD in international relations from Duke University, an MA in geography from Indiana University, and a BS from the United States Air Force Academy (5th class with women). She is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California. Atkinson's primary research focuses on U.S. military-to-military contacts as channels of international norm diffusion. She is also working on a project examining the influence of educational exchange programs on democratization and a project on the social construction of the biological warfare threat in the United States.

Jessica Weeks (respondent) is a doctoral candidate in the Stanford Department of Political Science. Her research interests include foreign policy decision-making in non-democratic regimes, the settlement of military crises, and the effects of foreign military interventions on target states. She will be a pre-doctoral fellow at CISAC during 2007-2008. Jessica received her BA in political science from The Ohio State University, and an MA in international history and politics from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Carol Atkinston Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for International Studies Speaker University of Southern California
Jessica Weeks Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science Commentator Stanford University
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Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe (speaker) is a visiting scholar at CISAC. Her PhD dissertation, entitled "Humanitarian Military Intervention: the Moral Imperative Versus the Rule of Law," focused on conflicting ethical and legal justifications for humanitarian military intervention. In an earlier publication, The Promise of Law for the Post-Mao Leadership in China, she examined the prospects for the development of the rule of law in China. Future projects will address the rule of law with respect to norms on use of force.

Donahoe earned her PhD in ethics and social theory from the Graduate Theological Union at the University of California Berkeley. She holds a JD from Stanford law school and an MA in East Asian studies from Stanford. She also earned an MA in theological studies from Harvard and spent a year studying Mandarin at Nankai University in Tianjin. After law school, Donahoe clerked for the Hon. William H. Orrick of the United States Federal District Court for the Northern District of California. She served as a teaching fellow at Stanford Law School and practiced high-tech litigation at Fenwick & West in Palo Alto, CA. She is a member of the California Bar.

Laura Donohue (respondent) is a fellow at CISAC and at Stanford Law School's Center for Constitutional Law. Donohue's research focuses on national security and counterterrorist law in the United States, United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Israel, and the Republic of Turkey. Prior to Stanford, Donohue was a fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she served on the Executive Session for Domestic Preparedness and the International Security Program. In 2001 the Carnegie Corporation named her to its Scholars Program, funding the project, "Security and Freedom in the Face of Terrorism." At Stanford, Donohue directed a project for the United States Departments of Justice and State and, later, Homeland Security, on mass-casualty terrorist incidents. She has written numerous articles on counterterrorism in liberal, democratic states. Author of Counter-terrorist Law and Emergency Powers in the United Kingdom 1922-2000, she is completing a manuscript for Cambridge University Press analyzing the impact of British and American counterterrorist law on life, liberty, property, privacy, and free speech. Donohue obtained her AB (with honors, in philosophy) from Dartmouth College, her MA (with distinction, in war and peace studies) from University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, and her PhD in history from the University of Cambridge. She received her JD from Stanford Law School.

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Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe Speaker
Laura Donohue Commentator
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British tradition and the American Constitution guarantee trial by jury for serious crime.1 But terrorism is not ordinary crime, and the presence of jurors may skew the manner in which terrorist trials unfold in at least three significant ways.

First, organized terrorist groups may deliberately threaten jury members so the accused escapes penalty. The more ingrained the terrorist organization in the fabric of society, the greater the degree of social control exerted under the ongoing threat of violence.

Second, terrorism, at heart a political challenge, may itself politicize a jury. Where nationalist conflict rages, as it does in Northern Ireland, juries may be sympathetic to those engaged in violence and may acquit the guilty. Alternatively, following a terrorist attack, juries may be biased. They may identify with the victims, or they may, consciously or unconsciously, seek to return a verdict that conforms to community sentiment. Jurors also may worry about becoming victims of future attacks.

Third, the presence of jurors may limit the type of information provided by the state. Where national security matters are involved, the government may not want to give ordinary citizens insight into the world of intelligence. Where deeply divisive political violence has been an issue for decades, the state may be concerned about the potential of jurors providing information to terrorist organizations.

These risks are not limited to the terrorist realm. Criminal syndicates, for instance, may try to intimidate juries into returning a verdict of not guilty, and public outrage often accompanies particularly heinous crimes. But the very reason why these other contexts give rise to a similar phenomenon is because terrorist crimes have certain characteristics-characteristics that may be reflected in other forms of crime, but which are, in many ways, at the heart of what it means for an act to be terrorist in nature: terrorist organizations are created precisely to coerce a population, or specific individuals, to accede to the group's demands. The challenge is political in nature, and the method of attack is chosen for maximum publicity. Terrorist organizations, moreover, can and often do use information about the state to guide their operations. It is in part because of these risks that the United Kingdom and United States have changed the rules governing terrorist trials-at times eliminating juries altogether.

This Article reflects on the relationship between terrorism and jury trial and explores the extent to which the three dangers identified can be mitigated within the criminal-trial framework.2 It does not provide a comprehensive analysis of the rich case law and literature that address jury trial-one of the most studied legal institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Instead, its aim is more modest: The text weighs the advantages and disadvantages of suspending juries specifically for terrorism. Here, the United Kingdom's experiences prove illustrative. The Article considers the extent to which similar concerns bear on the U.S. domestic realm, and the decision to try Guantánamo Bay detainees by military tribunal. It suggests that the arguments for suspending juries in Northern Ireland are more persuasive than for taking similar steps in Great Britain or the United States.

This Article then considers ways to address concerns raised by terrorism that stop short of suspending juries. Juror selection, constraints placed on jurors, and the conduct of the trial itself provide the focus. Of these, emphasis on juror selection, although not unproblematic, proves most promising. Again, distinctions need to be drawn between the United Kingdom and the United States. In the former, for instance, occupational bars to jury service could be lowered, while in the latter, increased emphasis on change in venue may prove particularly effective. Changes in the second category, constraints on jurors, may be the most damaging to the states' counterterrorist programs. Finally, while changes in the trial process may help to address risks, they also may prove contentious and be prone to seeping into the criminal realm. The Article concludes by questioning whether and to what extent such alterations could be insulated from the prosecution of non-terrorist criminal offenses.

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Does the proliferation of nuclear weapons cause ongoing conflicts to diminish or to intensify? The spread of nuclear weapons to South Asia offers an opportunity to investigate this crucial question. Optimistic scholars argue that by threatening to raise the cost of war astronomically, nuclear weapons make armed conflict in South Asia extremely unlikely. Pessimistic scholars maintain that nuclear weapons make the subcontinent war-prone, because of technological, political, and organizational problems. This book argues that nuclear weapons have destabilized the subcontinent, principally because of their interaction with India and Pakistan's territorial preferences and relative military capabilities. These findings challenge both optimistic and pessimistic conventional wisdom and have implications beyond South Asia.

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Andrew Bennett is a professor of government at Georgetown University. He is the co-author, with Alexander George, of Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (MIT, 2005), and the author of Condemned to Repetition? The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism 1973-1996 (MIT Press, 1999). Bennett served as a Council on Foreign Relations fellow at the Department of Defense in 1994-1995, and is a former fellow at the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University and the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.

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Andrew Bennett Professor, Department of Government Speaker Georgetown University
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This is a joint Science, Technology, and Security Seminar and CISAC Directors' Seminar. Lunch will be served, and RSVP is required.

Daniel Byman is the director of Georgetown's Security Studies Program and the Center for Peace and Security Studies as well as an associate professor in the School of Foreign Service. He has served as a professional staff member with the 9/11 Commission and with the Joint 9/11 Inquiry Staff of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Before joining the inquiry staff he was the research director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at the RAND Corporation. He is the author of Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism; Keeping the Peace: Lasting Solutions to Ethnic Conflict; and co-author of The Dynamics of Coercion: American Foreign Policy and the Limits of Military Might. He has also written widely on a range of topics related to terrorism, international security, and the Middle East.

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Daniel Byman Associate Professor, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service Speaker Georgetown University
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Drell Lecture Recording: NA

 

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Speaker's Biography: Thom Shanker is the national security and foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. He joined the Times in 1997 and began covering the Pentagon in May 2001, four months before the terrorist attacks. Previously, Shanker was foreign editor of the Chicago Tribune. From 1992 to 1995, as the Tribune's senior European correspondent, based in Berlin, he covered the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina; the departure of American, British, French, and Russian forces from Berlin; and emerging cases of nuclear smuggling in Central Europe.

Shanker spent two years in the master's degree program at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, specializing in strategic studies and international law. He has written on foreign policy, military affairs, and the intelligence community for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and American Journalism Review.

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Thom Shanker National Security and Foreign Policy Correspondent Speaker The New York Times
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