Saturday

Mohammad al-Ahmady

Mohammad al-Ahmady is a lawyer and director of the Yemen division of the Geneva-based NGO al-Karama, an independent human rights organization established in 2004 to assist all those in the Arab World subjected to, or at risk of, extra-judicial executions, disappearances, torture and arbitrary detention. Acting as a bridge between individual victims in the Arab world and international human rights mechanisms, al-Karama works towards an Arab world where all individuals live free, in dignity and protected by the rule of law. They recently released a report on donees in Yemen called License to Kill.

Ahmed Arman
Ahmad Arman is an attorney who is the executive secretary of the National Organization for Defending Rights and Freedoms (HOOD), based in Yemen, working on the issue of Guantanamo and the Yemeni detainees. He was one of the first people to investigate the Al Majala massacre and has investigated many drone strikes. He has been a researcher on drones for Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

Dalit Baum

Dalit Baum, Ph.D., is the co-founder of Who Profits from the Occupation, an activist research initiative of the Coalition of Women for Peace in Israel. During the last six years, Who Profits has become a vital resource for dozens of campaigns around the world, providing information about corporate complicity in the occupation of Palestine. In Israel, Dalit is a feminist scholar and teacher who has been teaching about militarism and the global economy from a feminist perspective in Israeli universities. As a feminist/ queer activist, she has been active with various groups in the Israeli anti-occupation and democratization movement, including Black Laundry, Boycott from Within, Zochrot, Anarchists against the Wall, and Women in Black. Working out of the Bay Area during 2010-11, Dalit has headed the Economic Activism for Palestine Program of Global Exchange, which supports corporate accountability campaigns in the U.S. She is currently the director of the Middle East Program of the American Friends Service Committee in San Francisco. .

Medea Benjamin

Medea Benjamin is a cofounder of both CODEPINK and the international human rights organization Global Exchange, and has been an advocate for social justice for more than 30 years. She is the author of eight books, her latest being Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control, and she is one of the most outspoken critics of US drone warfare and has been working to organize global resistance to the drones for many years. In May of 2013 she directly challenged President Obama during his foreign policy address at the National Defense University about his drone policies. She has led delegations to both Pakistan and Yemen to meet with victims of US drone strikes. Described as "one of America’s most committed -- and most effective -- fighters for human rights" by New York Newsday, and "one of the high profile leaders of the peace movement" by the Los Angeles Times, she was one of 1,000 exemplary women from 140 countries nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the millions of women who do the essential work of peace worldwide. In 2010 she received the Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize from the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the 2012 Peace Prize by the US Peace Memorial.

Marjorie Cohn

Cohn is a former president of the National Lawyers Guild. She lectures throughout the world on international human rights and U.S. foreign policy. A longtime criminal defense attorney, Professor Cohn is the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the Association of American Jurists, and is deputy secretary general of the Bureau of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her books include “Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law,” “Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent,” and “The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse.” Her anthology, “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues,” will be published next year by University of California Press. Professor Cohn is the recipient of several awards, including the 2008 Peace Scholar of the Year Award from the Peace and Justice Studies Association.

Chris Cole

For the past four years Chris Cole has been researching and campaigning on the issue of armed drones. He is co-author of Convenient Killing: Armed Drones and the Playstation Mentality (2010), secretary of the UK Drones Campaign Network and maintains the internationally respected Drone Wars UK website (www.dronewars.net). Chris regularly speaks at conferences, public meetings and with the media about drones and the growth of remote warfare. Chris has also been imprisoned a number of times for nonviolent direct action against war and war preparations, most recently in January 2011. In June 2013 he took part in the first act of civil disobedience against the use of British armed drones at RAF Waddington, from where British drones over Afghanistan are controlled.

Col. Morris Davis

Morris Davis is an attorney in Washington, D.C. He teaches at the Howard University School of Law and his is a 2013 winner of a Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award. He 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.

Essam

ESSAM is a New York based artist, born in New York and raised in Maine; He joined the US Army in 2003 where he served three years as a geospatial analyst. In 2006 ESSAM enrolled in the School of Visual Arts where he received a BFA in Photography. It was the military that informed his work as an artist where he now seeks to create conversations on both social and political issues. Over time ESSAM’s work became more experimental until in early 2012 he began working in the streets of New York. Over a 9-month period working stealthily by night he created his most notable work. ESSAM’s Drone campaign received national media attention and is largely responsible for raising awareness and bringing the dialogue on foreign and domestic UAV use to its current level. In November of 2012 ESSAM was arrested in his home by the NYPD for his artistic work on drones, his case is currently pending.On the morning of November 28th 2012, ESSAM was arrested in his home after being pursued for nearly a year by the NYPD for making provocative street art commenting on the domestic and international use of drone aircraft (UAV’s) by the United States and its police departments. The work has been featured in the New Yorker, ANIMAL, Complex magazine, Portland Press Herald, and countless other periodicals, as well as on CNN, Fox Business, and Russia Today.

Faisal bin Ali Jaber

Faisal bin Ali Jaber is a Yemeni civil engineer working on water issues in Yemen. Ever since his brother-in-law and nephew were killed by a US drone strike, he has become an outspoken opponent of drone warfare. In July 2013 he sent an open letter to President Obama asking for an apology for his family and all the “wrongly bereaved families of this secret air war”.

Pardiss Kebreaei

Pardiss Kebriaei is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Center Constitutional Rights, which she has been working since 2007. Her work focuses on challenging government abuses post-9/11, including in the areas of “targeted killing“ and unjust detentions at Guantanamo and in the federal system. She is lead counsel for CCR in Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta, which seeks accountability for the killing of three American citizens in U.S. drone strikes in Yemen, and was counsel in Al-Aulaqi v. Obama, which challenged the authorization for the targeting of an American citizen placed on government “kill lists.” She represents men currently and formerly detained at Guantanamo in their efforts for release and reintegration, and represented the families of two men who died at the base in their lawsuit for accountability, Al-Zahrani v. Rumsfeld. She also represents Fahad Hashmi, who pled to material support for terrorism after years in pre-trial solitary confinement and Special Administrative Measures, in his efforts to challenge his continuing solitary confinement in a federal “supermax” prison.

Abby Martin

Abby Martin is a studio anchor and correspondent in RT’s Washington, DC bureau. Breaking the
Set is a show that cuts through the false Left/Right paradigm and pre-established narrative set in the corporate news and political establishment. Host Abby Martin undermines the mainstream media propaganda while calling out the real players behind the scenes. Before coming to RT, Abby was involved in the creation of multiple new media projects. She is a self taught editor, videographer, writer, journalist and artist. In 2009, she founded her own citizen journalism media organization called Media Roots based in Oakland, CA. There, she editorially managed and produced hundreds of multimedia stories, including front line coverage of the Occupy Oakland crackdowns. Abby is also the youngest member on the board of Project Censored, the largest research organization in the country, that works to publish the top 25 censored news stories every year. While based in the Bay Area, she hosted a weekly radio show with Project Censored on KPFA, a Pacifica affiliate FM radio station. Abby received her Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from San Diego State University with a minor in Spanish.

Wade McMullen

Wade McMullen is a Staff Attorney with the International Strategic Litigation Unit at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights (RFK Center). In this capacity Mr. McMullen brings high impact human rights cases before international tribunals and advises local counsel on domestic high impact cases. Mr. McMullen currently represents clients before the Inter-American Commission on Human rights, the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, the United Nations Treaty Bodies, and other regional courts on issues ranging from the right to protest in Zimbabwe, to the right to nationality in the Dominican Republic, freedom of association and assembly in Uganda, and right to truth in Cuba. Previously Mr. McMullen was the first Donald M. Wilson Fellow at the RFK Center, and prior to joining the RFK Center he worked on forced labor and rule of law in India and children's health in Nicaragua. Mr. McMullen received his J.D. from the New York University School of Law, where he served as a researcher for the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions and helped represent two Yemeni survivors of the U.S. government's rendition and secret detention program.

Noor Mir

Noor Mir is the anti-drone campaign coordinator for CODEPINK and is based in the Washington, D.C. office, although she calls Islamabad, Pakistan her home. She graduated from Vassar College in 2012 with a major in Political Science and minors in French and English. While studying abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, she took courses on international law and targeted killings and was driven by what she learnt to turn it into a year long research thesis on drone warfare in Pakistan. Noor is passionate about killer drones, humanitarian law and race relations.

Nick Mottern

Nick Mottern is a reporter and director of Consumers for Peace.org, who has been active in anti-war organizing and has worked for Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, Bread for the World, the former US Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs and The Providence (RI) Journal - Bulletin.

Joseph Nevins

Joseph Nevins received his Ph.D. in geography from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He studies territorial and social boundaries, imperialism and other forms of political violence, and matters of human rights, international law and social justice in the aftermath of mass atrocities. In doing so, he has conducted research in East Timor, Mexico, and the United States-Mexico border region. He is the author of Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the “Illegal Alien” and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge, 2002), and A Not-so-distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor (Cornell University Press, 2005). He is currently working on a book on migrant deaths along the U.S.-Mexico boundary, and on a co-edited volume (with Dr. Nancy Peluso at University of California, Berkeley) on commodity production in Southeast Asia.

Mary Ellen O’Connell

Mary Ellen O’Connell is Research Professor of International Dispute Resolution at the Kroc Institute. She also is the Robert and Marion Short Professor of Law at Notre Dame, a position which she has held since 2005. O'Connell teaches a graduate-level course on international dispute resolution, advises Kroc graduate students, collaborates with Kroc faculty on research, and contributes to policy studies and public outreach. As an engaged Catholic intellectual, she deepens Kroc’s expertise in Catholic social ethics and theory of justice. She chaired the Use of Force Committee of the International Law Association from 2005 to 2010 and is currently a vice-president of the American Society of International Law. From 1995-1998, Professor O’Connell was a professional military educator for the Department of Defense in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany.

Entesar al Qadhi

Entesar al Qadhi is a prominent female Yemeni politician from Mareb, a prominent location for US drone strikes. She has been a youth representative at the National Dialogue Conference in Yemen, and was a leading voice in the Yemeni revolution that overthrew dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh. Entesar has a BA in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Sana’a and is an expert in conflict resolution. She has also worked for USAID and the National Democratic Institute.

Elsa Rassbach

Elsa Rassbach is a German-American peace activist, journalist and filmmaker. She is a founding member of the German Drone Campaign (Drohnen-Kampagne). She also leads the working group "GIs and US-Bases" in the German section of War Resisters International and is active in Peace Coordination Berlin and in Code Pink.

Suraia Sahar

Suraia Sahar is a founding member of Afghans for Peace (AFP), an alliance of Afghans from various ethnic, religious, socio-economic, cultural, and political backgrounds with a united vision for a democratic, all-inclusive, just, and peaceful Afghanistan. AFP includes students, professionals, community leaders, and activists, with chapters based in Afghanistan, the US, and Canada. Based in Toronto, Suraia has spoken at antiwar events across North America.

Samira Sayed-Rahman

Samira Sayed-Rahman is a member of Afghans for Peace (AFP), an alliance of Afghans from various ethnic, religious, socio-economic, cultural, and political backgrounds with a united vision for a democratic, all-inclusive, just, and peaceful Afghanistan. AFP includes students, professionals, community leaders, and activists, with chapters based in Afghanistan, the US, and Canada. Based in Toronto, Samira has spoken at antiwar events across North America.

Noel Sharkey

Noel Sharkey PhD, DSc FIET, FBCS CITP FRIN FRSA is Professor of AI and Robotics and Professor of Public Engagement at the University of Sheffield and was an EPSRC Senior Media Fellow (2004-2010). He has held a number of research and teaching positions in the UK (Essex, Exeter, Sheffield) and the USA (Yale,and Stanford). Noel has moved freely across
academic disciplines, lecturing in departments of engineering, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, artificial intelligence and computer science. He holds a Doctorate in Experimental Psychology and a Doctorate of Science. He is a chartered electrical engineer, a chartered information technology professional and is a member of both the Experimental Psychology Society and Equity (the actor's union). He has published well over a hundred academic articles and books as well writing for national newspaper and magazines. Noel is the founder of the International Committee for Robot Arms Control, who launched a Stop Killer Robots campaign last April.

Amie Stepanovich

Amie Stepanovich is the director of EPIC's Domestic Surveillance Project. Her work encompasses the Fourth Amendment, national security, cybersecurity, digital identity, international privacy, and open government. Ms. Stepanovich is an expert on drone surveillance and has testified in front of Congress on the need for privacy protections for domestic drone use. She has discussed the privacy implications of surveillance at many prominent events, including the Internet Governance Forum (US), the General Assembly of the Atlantic Treaty Association, and the Dialouge on Diversity conference. Prior to joining EPIC, Ms. Stepanovich received her J.D. from New York Law School, where she pursued studies on media law, technology, and the First Amendment. Ms. Stepanovich is the former editor-in-chief for the New York Law School Media Law & Policy law journal.

Madiha R. Tahir

Madiha R. Tahir is an independent multimedia and print journalist reporting on conflict, culture and politics in Pakistan. Her work has appeared in Foreign Affairs, The National, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Herald (Pakistan), The Friday Times, Caravan, as well as on Democracy Now!, PRI and BBC’s The World, Global Post and other outlets. Tahir is fluent in Urdu and Hindi and has a basic knowledge of Arabic. She holds a masters degree in Near Eastern Studies from NYU and an M.S. from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. Tahir has traveled extensively throughout Pakistan from Balochistan to Swat as well as to rural areas to report on the floods, Sufi music, the Baloch separatist movement, the salience of nationalism and religion, Islamist organizations and national electoral politics. She is co-editor of a volume, Dispatches from Pakistan with historian Vijay Prashad and editor Qalandar Bux Memon.

Brian Terrell

Brian Terrell is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence and lives and works at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in Maloy, Iowa. Brian also travels around Iowa and beyond, speaking and acting with communities that are working for justice and peace. His travels include Iraq and Afghanistan and he was deported from Bahrain in 2012 after witnessing the violent repression of human rights activists there. In recent years, he has been active in resistance to remote controlled murders by drones with friends in Nevada, New York and Missouri and on May 24 of this year he was released from a six month federal prison sentence for participating in a peaceable assembly in protest of drones at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Brian toured Germany, England and Wales in September and October, speaking and meeting with anti-drone activists.

Fahima Vorgetts

Fahima Vorgetts grew up in Afghanistan and from an early age, she was involved with the early women’s rights movement in that country. A chemist by training, she chose to become involved with educational programs for women. Although she was not formally affiliated with any women’s organizations for many years following her departure from Afghanistan, she remained a fervent and close supporter of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), as well as Humanitarian Aid to Women and Children of Afghanistan (HAWCA). She has arranged for the shipment of medical and other supplies to Afghanistan and has been actively involved in consciousness-raising and fundraising for many years. She has addressed the United Nations, has traveled widely to speak at conferences at universities and religious organizations, and has appeared on many national and international television and radio stations, including BBC and NPR. She has been featured in such publications as the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post. She is the director of Afghan Women’s Fund. She also is an honorary member of Afghanistan Organization for Human Rights and Environmental Protection.

Cornel West

Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard and the University of Paris. He has written 19 books and edited 13 books. He is best known for his classic Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and his new memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He appears frequently on the Bill Maher Show, Colbert Report, CNN and C-Span as well as on his dear Brother, Tavis Smiley’s PBS TV Show. He can be heard weekly with Tavis Smiley on "Smiley & West", the national public radio program distributed by Public Radio International (PRI).

Ann Wright

Ann Wright is a retired Army Reserve colonel and a 29-year veteran of the Army and Army Reserves. She was also a diplomat in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia, Afghanistan and Mongolia. She resigned from the Department of State on March 19, 2003, in opposition to the Iraq war. She is the co-author of “Dissent: Voices of Conscience”.

Sunday

Tighe Barry

After 9/11, Tighe Barry left his 20-year career as a prop man in Hollywood to become an activist and artistic director with the peace group CODEPINK. He has led seven delegations of Americans to Gaza, including a delegation to build playgrounds for the children of Gaza. He helped organize a delegation to Pakistan to meet with drone strike victims and a similar delegation to Yemen. He was deported from Bahrain for supporting the human rights movement there. He has organized dozens of protests against the indefinite detention of prisoners in Guantanamo. During his Hollywood career he worked on films such as Fugitive, Under Siege, Kingdom of Heaven, Collateral Damage, Universal Soldier, Terminator and Batman. He has also worked on TV shows, including as Melrose Place, X-Files and Monk.

Leah Bolger

Leah Bolger spent 20 years on active duty in the U.S. Navy and retired in 2000 at the rank of Commander. She is currently a full-time peace activist and serves as the National President of Veterans For Peace.

Bruce Gagnon

Bruce Gagnon is the Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He was a co-founder of the Global Network when it was created in 1992.

Clare Hanrahan

Clare Hanrahan is an Asheville, N.C. author, activist, organizer and speaker. She is an associate member of Veterans for Peace, a contributing editor to War Crimes Times, affiliate of the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee.

James Knight

James Knight is an artist and filmmaker, his latest film is Walking the Walk, which follows the group Voices for Creative Nonviolence during their June 2013 walk across Iowa to protest the Predator drone control center planned for the Iowa National Guard Air Base in Des Moines. He recently had a drone show at Gallery Project in Detroit.

Peter Lems

Peter Lems is the program director for Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran at the American Friends Service Committee. In December of 2008 he went to Afghanistan to visit with AFSC staff, contribute to a conflict assessment, and help design the organizations program work for the coming year. In November of 2007 he was on an assessment visit to Syria, and has led several delegations of Quakers to Iraq in June 2002 and April of 1999. Peter designs, coordinates, and implements educational and advocacy campaigns around Iraq, Afghanistan and U.S. foreign policy. Since 1988, he has worked for a variety of organizations focused on the Arab world, including the Palestine Human Rights Campaign, the Palestine Human Rights Information Center - International, and the Association of Arab-American University Graduates.

Jiva Manske

Jiva Manske currently lives in Washington, DC, where he leads grassroots organizing in Amnesty International USA's Mid-Atlantic region. For a living, he focuses on human rights education, leadership development, and public actions in DC, MD, VA, and WV. Jiva works closely with Amnesty members and coalition partners to build a strong grassroots movement to address pressing human rights issues, including abolishing the death penalty, defending immigrants' rights, stopping torture, and ending violence against women. In addition, he spent the last year and a half teaching an undergraduate seminar on conflict transformation at Georgetown University. The class has focused on learning the basics of the conflict transformation paradigm by focusing on the US criminal justice system, and has integrated theory and practice to sharpen our lens as conflict workers and develop tangible skills for social change that contributes to peace and justice.

Kait McIntyre

Organizer for Anti-War Committee and the Boeing Campaign, based in Chicago.

Robert Naiman

Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy. Mr. Naiman edits the Just Foreign Policy daily news summary and writes on U.S. foreign policy at Huffington Post. Naiman has worked as a policy analyst and researcher at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch. He has masters degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Illinois and has studied and worked in the Middle East.

Misty Rowan

Misty Rowan is a Twin City activist and poet.

Joe Scarry

Joe Scarry is a grassroots activist and organizer from Chicago, Illinois. He describes himself as “IT consultant by day, culture consumer by night, anti-war activist all the time.” Scarry is very involved with national efforts to combat domestic surveillance drones and the more local Chicago movement to free the NATO 5.

Baraa Shiban

Baraa Shiban is the Yemen project co-ordinator for Repreive and works to investigate US drone strikes in Yemen. As part of this project he has interviewed witnesses and civilian victims of US air strikes around Yemen and testified at a US congressional hearing on the impact of drones. He also serves as a youth representative in Yemen's National Dialogue

David Swanson

David Swanson co-founded the website After Downing Street, based around the U.S. congressional concern of the Downing Street Memo. Additionally, Swanson embarked on a campaign to impeach President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney through the now defunct website ConvictBushCheney.Org as well as contributing to the introduction of Dennis Kucinich’s The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush. Swanson has also aided in the organization of campaigns such as Velvet Revolution's opposition of the United States Chamber of Commerce and Tom J. Donohue, and October2011.Org's Occupy Washington movement. As an author, David Swanson has written several books; Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union (2009) and War Is a Lie (2010) and When the World Outlawed War (2011) and War No More: The Case for Abolition (2013). Swanson currently blogs through various political sites, including his own co-founded site, WarIsACrime.Org and Democrats.com, where he serves as the Washington Director.

Debra Sweet

Debra Sweet is the Director of World Can’t Wait, initiated in 2005 to “drive out the Bush regime” by repudiating its program, forcing it from office through a mass, independent movement and reversing the direction it had launched. Based in New York City, she leads World Can’t Wait in its continuing efforts to stop the crimes of our government, including the unjust occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and the torture and detention codes, as well as reversing the fascist direction of U.S. society, from the surveillance state to the criminalization of abortion and immigrants. She has worked with abortion providers for twenty-five years, organizing community support and helping them withstand anti-abortion violence. Since the age of 19, when she confronted Richard Nixon during a face-to-face meeting and told him to stop the war in Vietnam, she has been a leader in the opposition to U.S. wars and invasions. Debra says, “Stop thinking like an American, and start thinking about humanity!”

Jon Tucker

Jonathan B. Tucker is a performance poet, teaching artist, educator, and coach of the DC Youth Poetry Slam Team.

Stephen Whisler

Stephen Whisler is the creator of eye-catching, ominously tongue-in-cheek signs that read "Speed Enforced By Drones" along Highways 101 and 37 in Napa, California. Whisler said he made the signs because he made the connection between the "speed enforced by aircraft" signs on the highway and the recent controversy surrounding the federal government's collection of Internet data as part of its anti-terrorism efforts. He has gone on to produce a plethora of anti-drone artwork, from paintings, to sketches, to sculptures.