Thursday, January 23rd
12-2pm on Capitol Hill 

Douglas J. Feith is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute, where he heads the Center for National Security Strategies. He is the author of the New-York-Times-best-selling memoir War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, published in 2008 by Harper. He was a professor of national security studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

As Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from July 2001 until August 2005, he helped devise the U.S. government’s strategy for the war on terrorism and contributed to policy making for the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. His duties included managing the Defense Department’s international relations and representing the Department in interagency policy making.

Mr. Feith helped plan the worldwide changes in the U.S. defense posture, develop new U.S. strategic partnerships with India and Pakistan, promote NATO enlargement and reform and craft U.S. policy toward China. Mr. Feith advised President Bush and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld on the range of national security issues, including the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran, the counter-insurgency in Colombia and Palestinian-Israeli peace diplomacy.

Before President Bush appointed him in July 2001, Mr. Feith was for fifteen years the managing attorney of a Washington, D.C. law firm. In the Reagan Administration, Mr. Feith worked at the White House as a Middle East specialist for the National Security Council and then served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy.

Mr. Feith’s writings on foreign and defense affairs have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Commentary, Foreign Affairs, and elsewhere. 

Professor Eugene Kontorovich 

Eugene Kontorovich is a professor at George Mason’s Antonin Scalia School of Law, and the director of its Center for International Law in the Middle East. Before coming to George Mason, he had been a professor at Northwestern University School of Law for 11 years. An expert in international and constitutional law, he has published over thirty academic articles in the leading law reviews and peer-reviewed journals. His scholarship has been cited in leading international law cases in the U.S. and abroad.

Prof. Kontorovich is also the head of the International Law Department at the Kohelet Policy Forum, a Jerusalem-based think tank, and is recognized as one of the world’s preeminent experts on international law and the Israel-Arab conflict. He "has emerged as a one-man legal lawfare brain trust for the Jewish state,” as well as “one of the cagiest commentators,” according to a recent essays in Haaretz.

Prof. Kontorovich also plays a leading role in many Israel-related policy matters, and is regarded as the “intellectual architect” of U.S. state laws regarding boycotts of Israel. In his work at Forum Kohelet, he regularly advises senior Israeli, U.S. and European officials on a variety of diplomatic issues.

He attended the University of Chicago for college and law school, and ultimately taught there for two years as a visiting professor. After law school, he clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. In a previous career, he was a newspaperman at the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and for many years at the Forward.