Weekly Commentator Biographies

Gordon G. Chang is the author of Nuclear Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World, released by Random House in January 2006. Showdown focuses on nuclear proliferation in general and the North Korean crisis in particular. His first book is The Coming Collapse of China (Random House, August 2001).

He is a columnist at Forbes.com. He lived and worked in China and Hong Kong for almost two decades, most recently in Shanghai, as Counsel to the American law firm Paul Weiss and earlier in Hong Kong as Partner in the international law firm Baker & McKenzie. His writings on China and North Korea have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Far Eastern Economic Review, the International Herald Tribune, Commentary, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and Barron’s. He has spoken at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Yale, and other universities and at The Brookings Institution, The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, RAND, the American Enterprise Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and other institutions.

He has given briefings at the National Intelligence Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Pentagon. He has also spoken before industry and investor groups including Bloomberg, Sanford Bernstein, and Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia. Chang has appeared before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. He has served two terms as a trustee of Cornell University.

Frederick Fleitz joined the Central Intelligence Agency during the directorship of William J. Casey and served as a senior analyst for almost two decades. During the administration of President George W. Bush, Mr. Fleitz served as chief of staff to John Bolton, then Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. In 2006, Mr. Fleitz became a professional staff member with the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, acting as a senior advisor to Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the committee chairman and later ranking Republican member.

During an intelligence and public career spanning 25 years, Mr. Fleitz specialized in global, international and economic security, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, peacekeeping, the United Nations, arms control and intelligence collection. His duties have taken him to hot spots around the globe as a representative of the United States. Mr. Fleitz is the author of Peacekeeping Fiascoes of the 1990s (Praeger) and is completing a book on how 9/11 changed the role and effectiveness of U.S. intelligence. Mr Fleitz holds an MA in Political Economy from Fordham University and a BA in Politics from Saint Joseph’s University.

Bill Gertz is Geopolitics editor, national security correspondent and columnist for The Washington Times, and has been with the newspaper since 1985. Bill is the author of six books, four of which were national bestsellers. His 1999 book, “Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security,” (Regnery, May 1999) was on the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks. His second book, “The China Threat: How the People’s Republic Targets America,” (Regnery) was released in November 2000. His book, “Breakdown: How America’s Intelligence Failures Led to September 11,” was published in August 2002 and was a national bestseller.

Jim Hanson served as a Weapons Sergeant in 1st Special Forces Group across most of the Pacific Rim and also spent three years with the Army in Germany and much of Europe prior to that. He also writes and produces videos for the award-winning military site BLACKFIVE. You can follow him on Twitter @Uncle_Jimbo.

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor and a Contributing Editor with National Review Online. He co-chairs the Center for Law and Counterterrorism, a joint project of FDD and the National Review Institute, where he also serves as a senior fellow. From 1993 through 1996, while an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he led the prosecution against the jihad organization of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, in which a dozen Islamic militants were convicted of conducting a war of urban terrorism against the United States that included the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks.

Mr. McCarthy also made major contributions to the prosecutions of the bombers of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the Millennium plot attack Los Angeles International Airport. Following the September 11 attacks, Mr. McCarthy supervised the U.S. Attorney’s Anti-Terrorism Command Post in New York City, coordinating investigative and preventive efforts with numerous federal and state law enforcement and intelligence agencies. From 1999 through 2003, he was the Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District’s satellite office, responsible for federal law enforcement in six counties north of New York City.

Mr. McCarthy is the author of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America (2010) and Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad (2008).

Ambassador Roger F. Noriega is a former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs (Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean) and a former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American States. He coordinates AEI’s program on Latin America and writes for the Institute’s Latin American Outlook series. Experience Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, U.S. Department of State, 2003-2005 U.S. Ambassador, 2001-2003; Senior Adviser, 1993-94, Organization of American States Staff Member, Foreign Relations Committee, U.S. Senate, 1997-2001 Staff Member, International Relations Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, 1994-97 Senior Policy Adviser, U.S. Mission to the Organization of American States, 1990-93 Staff, U.S. Agency for International Development and U.S. Department of State, 1986-90

Bill Roggio is the Managing Editor of The Long War Journal; the president of Public Multimedia Inc., a nonprofit media organization with a mission to provide original and accurate reporting and analysis of the Long War; a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; a Hoover Institute Media Fellow; and a contributor to the The Weekly Standard. His coverage includes the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Lebanon, and Iraq, as well as al Qaeda’s operations, tactics, and strategy.

Bill has embedded with the US Marine Corps, the US Army, the Georgian Army, the Iraqi Army, and the Iraqi police in Iraq in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, and with the Canadian Army in Afghanistan in 2006. His articles have been published in The Washington Times, The New York Post, The National Review, The Toronto Times, and Die Weltwoche. His photographs have been published in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He also presents regularly at the US Air Force’s Contemporary Counterinsurgency Warfare School on the media and embedded reporting. Bill served as a signalman and infantryman in the US Army and the New Jersey National Guard from 1991 to 1997.

Diana West is the author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character (St. Martin’s Press 2013), and The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (St. Martin’s Press 2007). Her weekly newspaper column is syndicated by Universal Uclick, and West also serves as Washington Correspondent for the European weekly newspaper Dispatch International.

West is one of 19 co-authors (including Frank Gaffney, Andrew C. McCarthy and James Woolsey) of Shariah:The Threat to America, a 2010 publication of the Center for Security Policy,West’s work has appeared in many publications including The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, and The Washington Post Magazine, and her fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. She has made numerous television and radio appearances, and was featured in the Glenn Beck TV documentaries “The Project” and “Rumors of War III.”