Joshua L. Dratel

Joshua L. Dratel is an attorney in New York City, and practices criminal defense law in the state and federal courts. Mr. Dratel has been defense counsel in several terrorism and national security prosecutions, including that of Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, who was acquitted in federal court in Idaho in 2004; Wadih El-Hage, a defendant in United States v. Usama bin Laden, which involved the August 1998 bombings of the United States embassies in Kenya and Tanzania; and Mohamed Suleiman al-Nalfi, another defendant in the Embassy Bombings case. He was also lead counsel for David Hicks, an Australian detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Mr. Hicks’s prosecution by U.S. military commission, and currently represents Mohamed El-Mezain, a defendant in the federal prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, and, for sentencing and on appeal, Lynne Stewart, a New York lawyer convicted of material support for terrorism. He is a past president of the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (2005). He has appeared on panels, and on ABC’s Nightline, with regard to the issue of civil liberties and security in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. He is a co-author of the 2003 Supplement of Practice Under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, and his articles on a variety of criminal law subjects have appeared in The Champion, The Mouthpiece, and Criminal Justice Weekly. He is co-editor with Karen J. Greenberg of The Torture Papers: The Legal Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge University Press, 2005), a compendium of government memoranda, and The Enemy Combatant Papers: American Justice, the Courts, and the War on Terror (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He is a 1978 Magna Cum Laude graduate of Columbia College, and a 1981 graduate of Harvard Law School.