Investigative reporter Dana Priest has worked at the Washington Post for nearly twenty-five years, covering intelligence, the military, national health care reform, and local news. She has traveled overseas on various reporting assignments, including with Special Operations Forces on training missions, with army troops on peacekeeping deployments, and, in 2000, with the regional combatant commanders in charge of U.S. military operations around the world.
Priest has won every major journalism award, including the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for public service for “The Other Walter Reed” and the 2006 Pulitzer for beat reporting for her work on CIA secret prisons and counterterrorism operations overseas. Her 2003 book, The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military (W. W. Norton), was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. She lives in Washington, DC.
William M. Arkin has been a columnist for the Washington Post and washingtonpost.com since 1998. He was an army intelligence analyst in West Berlin in the 1970s. Since Operation Desert Storm in 1991, he has conducted bomb damage assessments on the ground in Iraq, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Eritrea, visiting more than eight hundred targets and briefing his findings to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the CIA, the air force, and others.
Arkin was an adviser to a United Nations fact-finding mission to Israel and Lebanon and a consultant on Iraq to the office of the U.N. Secretary-General. He has worked for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Human Rights Watch, and Greenpeace. He has taught at the School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, U.S. Air Force, Maxwell AFB, Alabama; and been a fellow at both the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and the Center for Strategic Education at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He lives in Vermont.