Anthony Camerino

Tony Camerino is a writer known for his work on all five seasons of the hit CBS drama "Person of Interest," which won two People’s Choice Awards. He has written on three other network television dramas ("A.P.B," "Taken," and "The Enemy Within"), and developed original projects for Netflix (a "Black Hawk Down" tv adaptation), Amazon, Fox, and Fremantle. His feature script "Landslide" (co-written with Will Staples), based on his military memoir "How to Break a Terrorist," made the 2015 Blacklist. He also authored "Kill or Capture" and won an Emmy for his writing on a documentary about JFK called "Clouds Over Cuba."

Camerino is a combat veteran of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Iraq, and retired with 20 years of service in the Air Force and Air Force Reserves. He started his career as a Special Operations helicopter pilot, and was awarded an Aerial Achievement Medal for his accomplishments in the Balkans. He later served as a Special Agent in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations where he conducted criminal investigations and counterintelligence missions. As a senior military interrogator for a Special Operations Task Force in Iraq, he personally conducted or supervised over 1,300 interrogations. Camerino was awarded the Bronze Star Medal for his achievements, including leading the interrogations that located Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the notorious Al Qaeda leader and father of ISIS, who was killed in a subsequent airstrike.

An outspoken critic of torture, he frequently appears as an interrogations expert on television and radio and has published Op-Eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and a cover story, “Martyrdom, Interrupted,” in The National Interest. Camerino has trained U.S. Army interrogators, U.S. Marshals, and foreign interrogators from 17 countries. Most recently, he trained police and military personnel in Nigeria and Cameroon for the United Nations. He is a Fellow at UCLA’s Burkle Center for International Relations and a screenwriting instructor at UCLA Extension.