Michael Hayden previously served as director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the country’s first principal deputy director of National Intelligence, and as director of the National Security Agency. He also served as commander of the Air Intelligence Agency, director of the Joint Command and Control Warfare Center, and chief of the Central Security Service. He retired as a four-star general from the U.S. Air Force after 39 years of active service. General Hayden is currently a principal at the Chertoff Group where he focuses on intelligence and risk analysis.

Marc Thiessen served as chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and before that as a senior aide to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jesse Helms. He is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of the book Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack (2010). Thiessen writes regularly for the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Review, Weekly Standard, Daily Beast, and other publications.

David Frakt is a professor at Barry University’s Dwayne O. Andreas School of Law and a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve JAG Corps. From April 2008 to August 2009, he served as lead defense counsel with the Office of Military Commissions where he became the first military defense counsel to win the dismissal of charges in a military commission in the case of Mohammed Jawad. He was previously an associate professor and director of the Criminal Law Practice Center at Western State University College of Law in Fullerton, California.

Stephen Jones is managing partner of the law firm of Jones, Otjen, and Davis. For more than thirty years he has been involved in the defense of “high profile” cases involving alleged acts of terrorism and/or disloyalty stretching back to Vietnam War. In May 1995, he was appointed by the U.S. District Court to serve as the principal defense counsel for Timothy McVeigh, charged in the Oklahoma City bombing case. He has also represented retired or former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and National Security Council staff.