Imtiaz Ali
Imtiaz Ali is a Pakistan-based journalist working as a special correspondent for the Washington Post and a Pakistani TV channel. He reported for the BBC on the U.S. attacks on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in the wake of September 11th. Ali has also worked with Pakistan’s premier English-language newspapers, The News and Dawn. Since 2002, Ali has reported extensively on the Taliban, militancy in the border regions, and Pakistan’s military operations against al-Qaeda operatives and their local supporters in the tribal areas along the Afghan border. His writings have appeared in London’s Daily Telegraph and on the Web site of the Washington, D.C.-based Jamestown Foundation. Born and raised in a traditional Pashtun family in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, Ali earned his master’s degrees in journalism and political science from the University of Peshawar. He was a Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford and is a 2008 Yale World Fellow — a global leadership program at Yale University.
George Billard
George Billard is a Network 20/20 Board member and a filmmaker based in New York City. He is president of Do Diligence, a film production company with productions in more than 30 countries, including Mongolia, Japan, Peru, French Polynesia, Australia, Morocco, Egypt, Turkey, and Chile’s Easter Island. He is also president of Miracle Media, where he produced and directed The Well-Seasoned Traveler for the A&E television network. Billard has created a library of motion picture imagery that is distributed internationally. He has a B.A. in broadcast and film from Boston University, and in 2005 he earned an M.P.A. from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
Tai-Heng Cheng
Professor Tai-Heng Cheng is Associate Director of the Center for International Law at New York Law School, and Of Counsel to the law firm Hoguet Newman Regal & Kenney, LLP. He is Honorary Fellow of the Foreign Policy Association, Member of the Academic Council of the Institute for Transnational Arbitration, and Member of the Awards Committee of the American Society of International Law. Professor Cheng is also a member of the American Arbitration Association international panel, and the International Institute for Conflict Prevention & Resolution panel. He has been a visiting professor at the City University of Hong Kong and Sarah Lawrence College, and was formerly associated with the law firm Simpson Thacher & Barlett LLP. Professor Cheng holds a Doctor of the Science of Law degree and a Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School, where he was a Howard M. Holtzman Fellow for International Law. He also holds an M.A. degree and a law degree with first-class honors from Oxford University, where he was an Oxford University Scholar.
Patricia S. Huntington
For more than 20 years, Patricia S. Huntington has advised grant makers in foreign policy, international development programs, and strategic philanthropy. Her clients have included American Express, the Ford Foundation, and the Sumitomo Corporation. Prior to founding Network 20/20, Dr. Huntington directed a Rockefeller Foundation field research project in 11 countries on four continents. Dr. Huntington reported the results in a position paper, “Landmines and U.S. Leadership: A View from the Field.” She also created an educational CD-ROM on global humanitarian mine clearance entitled “Landmines: Clearing the Way,” which has been disseminated widely throughout the world.
Dr. Huntington is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Women’s Foreign Policy Group, Women in International Security, and the Foreign Policy Association’s Off-the-Record Lecture Series. She is a member of the Board of the Fund for Peace and sits on the advisory board of New York Law School’s Center for International Law. She earned a summa cum laude for her Smith College undergraduate work on British imperialism in southern Africa, an M.A. in African history from UCLA, and an Ed.D. from Rutgers University.
Abid H. Imam
Recently an attorney at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman in New York, Abid H. Imam has provided services to Legal Aid and is a member of the Asia Society. While obtaining his J.D. from Columbia School of Law, he focused on international trade law. As an undergraduate at Yale University, Imam studied Middle Eastern and South Asian history and politics. Born and raised in Pakistan, Imam belongs to a political family committed to electoral politics. His mother served as the ambassador to the United States, and both his parents and sister have been elected to the local, provincial, and national tiers of the legislature.
Glenn Johnston
Glenn Johnston is a director of business research for Kroll — one of the world’s leading risk consulting companies — and is head of business development for the North America region. Before joining Kroll, he held director-level positions at the law firms of Loeb & Loeb and Covington & Burling. Earlier in his career, Johnston was a financial journalist and worked in London and New York. He also spent four years as a public affairs officer with the United Nations, where he was assigned to the General Assembly’s Legal Committee and the Security Council. Johnston has a law degree from Trinity College, Dublin.
Clark Lombardi
An expert in Islamic legal systems, Professor Lombardi teaches constitutional, comparative, and development law at the University of Washington Law School. Professor Lombardi focuses on the way constitutional systems deal with religious organizations and religious law.
In 2006, he published State Law as Islamic Law in Modern Egypt: The Incorporation of Shari`a into Egyptian Constitutional Law. Professor Lombardi was named a Carnegie Scholar for 2006-08, allowing him to study judicial opinions in three non-Arab Muslim countries: Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Malaysia. As a Carnegie Scholar, he is researching how past judges have interpreted Islamic law and how modern judges who are trained in the Western legal tradition are interpreting Islamic law. From his research, he will produce a book and a website.
Andy McCord
Andy McCord is a freelance writer who specializes in the politics and culture of South Asia. He has an A.B. in the Study of Religions from Harvard College. He reported on the 1988 elections in Pakistan for the U.S. weekly India Abroad and for the Indo-Asian News Service. In 1996, he was a senior Fulbright scholar based in Lahore. He has visited Pakistan often in connection with a biography he is preparing of Pakistani poet and dissident intellectual Faiz Ahmed Faiz, for which he has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His writings on South Asian politics have appeared in the Nation, Dawn (Karachi), Verve (Bombay), the Journal of Asian Studies, the Hindu, and other publications. As a translator, he contributed to the New York Times project in 2002 analyzing notebooks and other materials found by Times reporters in al- Qaeda safe houses in Afghanistan.
Madiha R. Tahir
Madiha R. Tahir received her master’s degree in Near Eastern studies from NYU. She is fluent in Urdu and Hindi and has a working knowledge of Arabic. Born in Pakistan, Tahir immigrated to the United States with her family for political asylum and continues to be active in the Pakistani immigrant community. She has contributed freelance work for various documentary projects and is an advanced M.S. student at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Tahir retains a keen interest in reporting on Pakistani politics and American foreign policy in the region.
