Harvey Rishikof
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|---|---|
Harvey Rishikof in 2017
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| Nationality | American |
| Occupation(s) | law professor, government official |
| Known for | Tried to negotiate plea deals with the suspect charged at the Guantanamo military commissions |
Harvey Rishikof is an American lawyer who was the Convening Authority for the Guantanamo military commission in 2017 and early 2018.[1][2][3]
Rishikof was the previous[timeframe?] chair of the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Law and National Security.[4] In 2020 he was a visiting professor at Temple University.[5]
His past positions include:
Rishikof and his deputy, Air Force Colonel Gary Brown were dismissed early in 2018.[1]
A former prosecutor, Morris Davis, made a comparison between the Donald Trump Presidency and a sports team firing its coach.[1]
Think about that for a moment. If a professional football team was on its seventh head coach and sixth quarterback in less than a dozen years, that team would almost certainly be a loser.[1]
Richikof and Brown had been negotiating with the suspects' lawyers, offering to take the death penalty off the table, if they agreed to plead guilty, and accept a life sentence.[6][7][8]
Rishikof and Brown expressed concern about the simultaneous removal of the convening authority and legal adviser. They also objected to the possible simultaneous appointment of two convening authorities as, according to the declaration, the Pentagon appointed the acting convening authority, Jim Coyne, before informing Rishikof of his removal.`
Rishikof was a co-principal on MITRE's Cyber Supply Chain Study for the Defense Industrial Base and is a member of the National Academy of Science's Committee on Encryption: Law Enforcement and Intelligence.
Harvey Rishikof is a Visiting Professor at Temple University Beasley School of Law and the Director of Policy and Cyber Security Research at the University of Maryland Applied Research Laboratory For Intelligence and Security, and the Senior Counselor to the ABA Standing Committee on Law and National Security.
Retired Air Force Col. Gary Brown also claims that he and the former head of the military court were fired because they were negotiating a controversial cost-saving proposal with defense lawyers: allow Guantánamo prisoners — including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-defendants in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — to plead guilty in exchange for life in prison rather than face the death penalty. Such plea deals, Brown says, 'would stop wasting resources.'
Rishikof and Brown said in a declaration filed with a military judge earlier this week that they were not advised of any concerns about their performance before they were abruptly fired last month.
Mr. Rishikof and his legal adviser, Gary Brown, said in a joint affidavit that they had not been warned in advance that senior Pentagon officials were unhappy with their performances but were aware that they had made some unpopular and controversial decisions, including discussing guilty pleas in the two capital cases in exchange for life in prison rather than execution.
